When life feels heavy, going outside makes us feel light again …

Sometimes the falling leaves feel heavy, brown, smothering

adding up to all the moments I wasn’t quite enough

for me, my son, my parents, my husband, my everyone

burying possibility in a dank pile of mush.

 

But sometimes the falling leaves feel floaty, golden, freeing

each one an echo of an imperfectly grateful exhale

that becomes the laugh I least expected

forming piles of possibility in layers of fading sunlight.

 

The sun hides for months on end in these latitudes

sleet and slush the begrudged and grungy visitor

plastered in a haze across our once-bright windows

shrouding the memories of headlong hedonism.

 

I never welcome the grungy grey gracefully

but rather struggle to find the golden in the brown.

It always turns out, though, that freedom from smother

is simply the gratitude for good.

 

Open-mouthed kisses blown from wide-spread fingers

A husband sleeping on the couch to give his wife a quiet bed

Ukulele strums with mumbled half-assed harmonies

A photo book made with painstakingly perfect captions and colors.

 

Meanwhile, the leaves fall like so many stories

each one sighing through the air with its own

weight and momentum

settling into the piles that layer our lives.