The nights are chilly, the cicadas sing, and the moon is sharply bright in the crisper air. Although autumn is my favorite season and I’ve even written about it here, there is a part of me that is mournful as I say goodbye to summer and the joys of easy days and gardening, being outside so many hours, eating and playing and working. I was so excited this year because I finally had some stalks of hollyhocks mature enough to bloom. It’s been challenging to get them going, yet they did grow tall this summer and bloomed in all kinds of colors, including the startling black. I am sad to say goodbye to all those beautiful things, to see them droop and fade.
However, while contemplating all this, I am looking forward too to the yellows and reds and oranges, that final blaze of autumn before the fire disappears into winter’s ashy colors. Each season holds something good. I see my flowers fading, but they also give promises for the spring, their seeds. I move to the hollyhocks with a small paper bag and pull the tiny baskets of seeds left by each bloom. Marigolds are next, then zinnias, each seeded bloom placed into the bags, put into the garden basket to store until spring.
As I worked, I thought of these recent beginning days of school and the promises, as seeds hold, that teachers give students for the year to come. Teachers work so hard to prepare just the right environment so that each student will be able to grow. They water with kindness, provide knowledge like fertilizer, and tend the learning from the first day to the last. Like seeds that flourish, teachers have started planting their classroom gardens with promises of a prolific blooming season. Perhaps I’m not so mournful after all, because I see promise everywhere I look.
