When wrong makes right?

Until a restless leaf flutters to the ground, it’s quiet. Instead of luscious green with lively veins exhaling oxygen into a suffocating world, it’s now cracked and dry. Yet even at its death, the burnt orange and raspberry color is stunning. Then my eye catches something else. I sit on the concrete bench at the Botanic Gardens. Today is my birthday.

Gravity beckons the fallen leaves, but like a salmon trying to span, I notice a monarch lifting herself up into the warm air. I wonder where she will go now the visitors hours have changed, the soil goes into hibernation and the once budding lilacs are crumpled and shriveled… I ache to throw the pitiful flowers into a garbage bag, or a gardener to haul them away.

A crisp breeze reminds me that the seventy degrees of perfect weather is a façade…. Soon the sun will set and the chill of any October past will awaken goose bumps that are Colorado. The bipolar state where ugly weather doesn’t just disappear; instantaneously, it becomes glorious. A morning thunderstorm of lightening and hail will flip into a cloudless afternoon where cocktails can be toasted on the patio swing.

And like all birthdays, this too shall pass and the reality of autumn; snowfall and frigid holidays are watching me sit here. And once the first snowflakes fall from the fluffy clouds, then too, the last leaves hanging onto the bare branches, with some dignity remaining, will turn to slush, and people will dust off ski gear.

Driving over here I received a phone call from someone I was very close with on my birthday last year. Oh to waddle twelve months ago and take stock of life. The portfolio of mistakes you paid the premium, and the luck you found dirt-cheap.

Most chapters, the years never have the luxury of completed endings, sure… there are photos glazed with smiling faces, some strangers, some close friends who’ve somehow over the years turned strangers again. There are the farewell fetes and the amicable breakups, the career paths which go rerouted, and the farewells to grandparents… the final kind of goodbye where you don’t get to hear anymore stories of your parents growing up, or advice from eight decades of mistakes and good decisions.

The butterfly lands next to me. I wonder if she knows I’m sitting here. I’d prefer to think that she does. That she has human thoughts, she is excited to unearth a human friend at the Botanic Gardens, because only the birds and the grasshoppers appear visit here nowadays. She sits with me, ready and eager to go down the long stretch ahead dubbed, “memory lane.”