I don’t like Autumn. There, I’ve said it.

You might. You may speak of the beauty of the Fall’s explosion of colours, the lack of aggressive insects, the crisp air on your walks. 

Me? I see the death of my garden. Stepping out on my porch into the dampness by the river and its rapids, where my house sits, I grieve the soft, summer nights. Now, there is the pervasive sense of foreboding knowing that winter is on its way.  We will be forced indoors. This eventuality makes me sad as I am now, in the Autumn of my own life. 

Last year, seeking the sun, Consort and I flew to a Caribbean Island. We were joyous as the pandemic seemed behind us. While there, under the blue sky and sea, where nothing bad could ever happen, there were hotel workers coughing. I thought Oh No. No. No. No. There are places in the world where the staff must work—they do not receive time off when they are sick—they have families to support. I was in a triple vortex of exposure to Covid, its variables, and Pneumonia.

Back home, in my beautiful town, I became very ill.  At Death’s Door ill. At night, unable to sleep, I wondered why I ever left my story book house by the river. Why I was so keen to put myself in danger?  I thought, perhaps life is a young person’s game? I was loathe to admit that I was now sixty-five years old, a senior and that even though I received the inoculations, I subsumed to three different strains of a plague. I who had that I was a Zoomer (Boomer) with Zip.

Friends phoned from various towns to check in, some reporting from Cruises and Vacations with coughs, purporting that the dreaded strain had taken their joy. My meditations at night forced me to think too much. Gloomy and missing my friends who were dispersed around the province, around the world and not near and even my Consort no matter how hard he tried, could not relieve my loneliness. I felt helpless and worst of all, self-pitying. 

I had worked very hard in my life and for so long and always felt I lacked solitude. I dreamed of it, and I finally had it in my bedroom. I was lonelier than can be imagined in this particular fight. You can be lonely anywhere. In Italy, the South of France, in your car on a freeway in Los Angeles, in South Beach, Miami. But being in bed for 24 hours a day, for weeks on end, is the worst kind of lonely there is.

“The Kindness of Strangers” has never been a literary trope for me. I have always had dramatic and romantic longing—whether in the City or the Country, or whether I was six or sixty-six. Here, where I am now, how lovely the rolling Northumberland Hills have embraced me. I see them now with the trees enflamed. 

I am well. I have enjoyed my summer. It is Autumn once more. My time is my own. For so long it belonged to others and there was worry. But now it’s all mine.