After nearly a week of nonstop rain, we’ve been gifted the most perfect fall weather—sunny and cool, with a brilliant blue sky every single day. It’s been wonderful for the long walks I like to take. The other day I took the dog and walked along the wooded trail near our house. The main trail runs the length of a stream that connects into the Jones Falls and eventually ends up in the Baltimore harbor. Smaller, more rustic paths wind their way from the main trail down to the water and a thick curtain of tall trees and vines surround the stream on both sides. It’s very peaceful. I find it to be a little too buggy for my liking during the heat and humidity of summer, but this time of year, as the leaves begin to change and the breeze rustles through the trees amplifying the sensation of being near running water, it is one of my favorite places to be.
On this recent walk, I happened to look up at the moment a strong breeze blew loose a cluster of small yellow leaves from high atop an especially tall tree. The wind caught the leaves and sent them shooting upward like sparks flashing against the sky. They fell slowly then, swirling down and landing lightly along the path in front of me. I stood still and watched them fall, trying to take in everything about this moment that felt refreshing and uplifting.
I am not a person who can really meditate (I have tried and failed many times), but I am someone who can stop and notice a moment of beauty, catalog it in my mind and return to it briefly in times of stress as a way to calm myself, which is what I do with the image of these leaves when all the lights in our house won’t stop flickering.
I have an extreme fear of fire born from an early childhood experience that left my mother’s hand badly burned. (If you’d like, you can read more about that here.) Flickering lights for me signal fire—a fire that is soon to happen, or perhaps one that is already underway, lurking unseen behind the walls, sparked by a problem in the wiring. The lights flicker and in my mind the fire is already moving from room to room, taking over the whole house. I imagine that by the time we actually see smoke, it will be too late. The house will be overrun with flames and all we’ll be able to do is escape onto the street where we’ll stand barefoot in our pajamas and watch our home burn to the ground.
Our house was built in the 1840s from stone that is two feet thick. Sure the insides could be reduced to cinders, but this is not a house that can easily be turned into a pile of ash. When we first bought the place, all the utilities were kept in a small rundown shed attached to the side of the house. The hot water heater, the boiler, and the circuit breaker could only be accessed by going outside. At the time of our purchase the home inspector informed us that he couldn’t tell exactly how old the boiler was, but he did know that the company who made it had gone out of business in 1961. It needed a maintenance check every year. It wasn’t long for this world and during one routine maintenance visit when I asked what could happen to it apart from it simply breaking down and no longer being capable of heating our home, the plumber shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It could maybe explode.” This was my literal nightmare. I didn’t have a decent winter’s night sleep for years after I heard that.
We finally reached a point where we were able to afford a renovation on the house, the primary purpose of which was to upgrade these old systems and incorporate the utility space into the interior of the house. That we managed to get two additional rooms added to the footprint of our small home was just a bonus (and an absolute life saver when the work was completed in March of 2020, just as we found ourselves stuck in our house for months on end). The electrical work that was done with the renovation is only two and a half years old. It shouldn’t be flickering. The connections shouldn’t be loose. The wires shouldn’t be faulty. I shouldn’t be spending my evenings trying to convince my anxious mind that our house isn’t about to suddenly light up like a struck match and make us victims of a gruesome, fiery death. But alas, this is where my mind goes, so I close my eyes and picture the leaves.
We are trying to get to the bottom of the problem. The electric company has been out several times now, but nothing they’ve done has fixed the issue. My husband and I joke that perhaps it’s a ghost. It is almost Halloween after all. I would honestly prefer a ghost. Ghosts are not nearly as terrifying to me as fire.
I have done my best not to pass my anxious tendencies on to my child, which has not been an especially easy task given that his entire existence has taken place during either a Trump presidency, a global pandemic, or both at the same horrible time. I do not have a particular parenting philosophy. Most of the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to raising a kid. I just try to follow my instincts and wing it, and frequently remind myself that despite what our culture likes to tell us, as his mother, I am not solely responsible for determining how he turns out. But one thing I do believe when it comes to interacting with children, especially in this current moment when so much about our lives and our futures feels uncertain and scary, is that you have a responsibility to balance teaching kids how to confront and manage the hard stuff with sharing what is good and beautiful about the world. There is a lot of hard stuff, but there is also so much that is soft and comforting. There is a lot of sorrow, but there is also so much joy. Among the seemingly endless list of things to fear, there are reasons for hope and optimism.
My son likes to let us know when he catches the lights flickering. We have made it a group project. “There go the lights!” we shout to each other across the house. We have turned it into a kind of game, one that I am desperate to see come to an end, but that my son may be disappointed to have to stop. The flickering grows worse in the evenings, as the sunlight fades and the air cools down even further. Or perhaps it is simply more noticeable because we have more lights on and we are all home at once, keeping an eye out, catching every small flicker as we sit together eating dinner or go about our nightly routine.
Some evenings, we’ll all head out together to take the dog for a walk. We create little treasure hunts where we have to look for different types of Halloween decorations, or I challenge my son to see which one of us can find the most colorful leaves. Each week, more and more trees are changing colors. Red, orange, and yellow are popping up everywhere we walk. One evening we pass a tree where only the tips of the leaves have begun to turn. Small, pointed green leaves like spears tipped in bright red. I stop and draw my son’s attention to them. I show him how the color is starting to creep its way down the length of the leaf. It is beautiful, the way we lean our heads close together to get a better look. The way the fading sunlight slants through the tree branches and dots the road beneath our feet. The way something so small can settle your racing heart and erase the worries and tensions of the day.
In moments like this, the love I have for my life is so strong it feels like it might consume me, like a fire building up beneath my ribs, unseen and unstoppable.
I surrender myself to its warmth.
I always try to write a little something after my walks as sort of ritual or practice. After the walk mentioned at the beginning of this post, I quickly jotted down this poem that I will likely never revisit.
