Here’s the puzzle I did during the day on Halloween. This is the third stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. I don’t have any pictures from past celebrations because in the past I spent this holiday with my ancestors, as it is a time when the veil between the living and the dead thins and they are remembered. I visited cemeteries and did research. They feel closer to me this time of year.
Today, on All Souls’ Day, I am going to share a poem that resonates with me. My daughter found it posted on Facebook and shared it with me. It perfectly expresses my feelings about missing Tim these days.
Your heartbeat was my metronome My compass The rhythm I kept The north I followed
Your arms were my home My safety My belonging The one place I fit
Now I’m alone I can’t keep time I can’t find north And there’s no way home
~ Racheal Bashaw (No Way Home)
I live too far away from where our ancestors lie buried so I didn’t visit a cemetery. But I did something for Tim and created a memorial page for him on the Find a Grave website. Before he died we had discussed how we wanted to make sure we were buried near where we and our ancestors had lived most of our lives together, and I feel satisfied that I made that happen.
It is the beginning of a new project to add as many of our ancestors’ cemeteries to the database as I can. Since the public can see it without needing an invitation or a password it seems like it will be an excellent way to share the basics. Future descendants might stumble across it and be glad to know where to look for his grave. It won’t replace the pages for the ancestors I’ve posted on this blog; it will be an additional reference. And it’s impossible to know how long my blog will stay online after I’m gone.
Here’s the puzzle I started on the Autumn Equinox and finished this morning. This is the second stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. And a little trip down memory lane with some photos from past celebrations. Enjoy!
2021 ~ Old Mystic, Connecticut
Clyde’s Cider Mill
The two main things we used to do to celebrate the equinox were apple picking at Holmberg’s Orchard and picking up freshly pressed apple cider and pumpkin bread at Clyde’s Cider Mill. At home Tim used to make me a great cup of hot cider with cinnamon sugar on the rim of the cup. And although I don’t have too many pictures of leaf beds, an autumn day wouldn’t be complete without a walk through the ‘fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves‘ in the woods. 🍂
2020 ~ Holmberg Orchards, Ledyard, Connecticut
2020 ~ Holmberg Orchards
2016 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ hanging gourds
2016 ~ Holmberg Orchards
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! Painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence… How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. ~ Henry David Thoreau (Autumnal Tints)
It was during the pandemic that Tim & I started to include the First Harvest (Lughnasa, Lammas) in our celebrations of the eight festivals of the wheel of the year. Sunflowers were in full bloom at Buttonwood Farm in nearby Griswold, Connecticut and we decided to make going for a long walk through the huge field of them our tradition. Since moving to North Carolina three years ago I have been floundering, trying to figure out another way to mark the passing seasons. And now I’ve lost my companion.
2022 ~ our last trip to Buttonwood Farm
For the first six months after Tim died I was in shock. As I’ve started coming out of that anesthetized state I’ve been finding ways to live with the reality of my new situation in life. He was the absolute center of my life. I won’t go on about how much I miss him but I have noticed something unique about this grief. When I lost my parents I still had my life with Tim to return to for comfort. Life returned to normal, nothing changed in my household or daily routines after they died.
2021 ~ Buttonwood Farm
It feels like “everyone” now has gone back to their own lives, in their own houses, where nothing in their daily lives, plans, and routines has changed. Not so for me. A friend pointed out to me that widows in Victorian times wore black for two and a half years and there seems to be a good reason for this. It may well take that long to adjust to this and it’s good to remind others that while they have a life to return to, mine is forever altered.
Tim expressed similar feelings to me when his brother died in our house, after living with us for the last nine months of his life. He said the grief hit him harder and longer than when his parents died. And he thought it had everything to do with the fact that his brother had been living so intimately under the same roof with him.
2021
I’ve been making some comforting changes in my new life with myself. I went back to practicing yoga, osteoporosis be damned. I skip the spine-twisting moves and am feeling so refreshed, more grateful and at a peace. Tai chi was okay, but it just didn’t do much for me. Sometimes I realize that I am still grieving my loss of health and living by the sea, as well as missing Tim. I find comfort listening to great music on WMVY radio, streaming from Martha’s Vineyard. Doing familiar old jigsaw puzzles reduces anxiety very quickly for some reason.
2022
There is a sunflower field down here, but the bloom time is off for Lughnasa, and it occurred to me the other day that it is in a city park. We never got there to see it and perhaps one deterrent was the idea of driving into the city just didn’t appeal, no feeling of connecting with Mother Earth the way the drive into the countryside did.
I’ve made my peace with celebrating the Wheel of the Year by myself, at least for most of them. I now have a jigsaw puzzle for each of the 8 festivals and movies for some of them. I watched Dancing at Lughnasa for the first time since 2020, when I first had the movie idea. And I plan to go ahead with my annual winter solstice gathering with family and friends.
2022
The two things that have been the most difficult to find a way of doing without Tim are blogging and working on our family history. I hope to write about my halting progress with those endeavors in the coming months.
But for now, I’m sharing the puzzle I started on Lughnasa and finished this morning, as well as some pictures memories from past First Harvest trips to Buttonwood Farms. I will give myself this one journey around the Wheel of the Year, starting here, to celebrate with my puzzles and my memories. Then I will probably go back to simply the combining of paintings with words to mark the eight festivals.
2020 ~ Buttonwood Farm
We are the Flower — Thou the Sun! Forgive us, if as days decline — We nearer steal to Thee! ~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #161)
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts. ~ Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
When Tim & I moved into our new home in July of 2023 we were delighted to have a flowering dogwood in our front yard, tucked under the towering pines. We looked forward to seeing it bloom. But when the springs of 2024 and 2025 passed by without it flowering we were disappointed. It seemed to be a healthy tree with plenty of green leaves.
After I did some research we decided to order some fertilizer for acid-loving trees. It came in spikes and, as directed, early last summer Tim was out there hammering the spikes into the ground at the proper distance away from the trunk of the tree. Then sadly, in October he suddenly died.
One lovely morning near the end of March I went out to check the mail and noticed the blossoms, mostly higher up in the tree. It was such a bittersweet moment, stopping me in my tracks. Tim never got to see the results of his efforts to bring these lovely dogwood blossoms into our lives. As time goes on I know I will think of him with deep gratitude every time they bloom.
You might also notice that leaves growing closer to the ground, where the forest is shady, tend to be larger and softer. This is because trees are trying to absorb as much light as possible with these shaded leaves. Understory trees such as dogwoods live their lives in low light. They not only have larger leaves to absorb all the light they can get but also grow their branches in flat tiers so their leaves are spread out in single layers to make the most efficient use of the light that filters down to them. ~ Peter Wohlleben (Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees & Woodlands of North America)
Sometimes when one is feeling cooped up with summer cabin fever, the universe will send a little gift from the great outdoors right to one’s window. This little molting Carolina wren was sitting on a dead rhododendron branch, singing very loudly and with marked enthusiasm. A bright streak of sunshine bathed him in a magical aura. After I got my camera he started to preen, and preen, and preen.
Just now the wren from Carolina buzzed through the neighbor’s hedge a line of grace notes I couldn’t even write down much less sing.
Now he lifts his chestnut colored throat and delivers such a cantering praise — for what? For the early morning, the taste of the spider,
for his small cup of life that he drinks from every day, knowing it will refill. All things are inventions of holiness. Some more rascally than others.
I’m on that list too, though I don’t know exactly where. But, every morning, there is my own cup of gladness, and there’s that wren in the hedge, above me, with his
blazing song.
~ Mary Oliver (The Wren from Carolina)
‘Twas my lucky morning! You never know who might stop by. These pictures were taken through a dirty window with my neighbor’s wall and window in the background. I’m glad her shades were closed — there were already enough reflections cluttering up the shots. I’m surprised the photos came out as well as they did.
