In the Autumn of the Year

The cold chill of Autumn blew in just as my thirties ended.

On Friday, my fortieth birthday, we went downtown with Jimmy the mechanic, to see his friend the car dealer. But again, just as both other times, the car dealer wasn’t there.

The assistant took us out to the lot to look around, and we saw that the ugly blue car I’d named “Sacre Bleu” in August. Jimmy looked it over again, giving it a clean bill of health. The down payment was just a little more than we had, so we ran home to borrow a bit of money from a friend until we could scrap Serendipity.

On Saturday, Jimmy brought us downtown again, and I drove a car home for the first time in almost four months.

Jimmy spent the late afternoon and much of the next day ripping all the usable parts out of Serendipity and swapping them for the less auspicious parts of Sacre Bleu. They are both Altimas of the same generation, so that was easy. Serendipity was a flood car with every wire rotted, though she looked shiny and luxurious on the outside. She shook so bad that she destroyed the new motor mounts, and she’d developed a smoking gasket leak. Jimmy tried to drive her around to his backyard to perform the surgery, but he parked in a hurry when he heard the knocking, exclaiming “she’s gonna blow!” And he proceeded to do all the transplanting in front of the house.

On Sunday, I went to church for the first time since August, and it hurt, but not sharply.

On Monday, the wrecker came to take Serendipity away. He barely got her onto the tow truck without a catastrophe. I sang a corpse chant quietly under my breath as he drove off with my unlucky purchase. And then, finally, after all these months, I went for a hike.

I drove out to Jefferson Lake where the trilliums bloom. Of course, there were not trilliums blooming right now. There were a few scattered asters in the mud on the side of the trail, but those were all the flowers. There were no birds singing except for one cardinal and a few harsh-voiced hawks. I had missed the opportunity to hike through the warm green tunnel of summer trees: instead, I was under a noisy canopy of crimson and saffron.

An autumn wind shimmered the surface of the water, making it gray on top of green like dirty silver.

A doe stared in horror at me and fled into the trees. She is not a tame deer like the ones in Union Cemetery. She is smarter than I am. She understands that some humans are hunters.

I hiked all around the lake, listening, breathing, praying. Pretending to be a Tolkein elf or a dryad or a pioneer scouting out a place for my log cabin. Pretending that the Virgin Mary or Saint Michael was walking with me and reassuring me that God wasn’t angry at my failures.

At the end of my hike, I sat on the dock and watched the water move.

I’d had fantasies about jumping off the little boat dock to go for a swim, but it was far too cold even for my taste.

I am middle-aged now, and I’ll never be what I ought to be.

I am a ridiculous joke of a person: A Catholic who believes every word of the Nicene Creed but often can’t be near the sacraments due to severe religious trauma. An autistic woman, queer in both the modern and the archaic sense of the word. A gullible fool who’s been tricked by cult leaders and con artists and car dealers and others because I can’t stop thinking the best of people. Someone who keeps getting hurt by people who take advantage. A writer in six figure student debt who lives from month to month and never has a plan. A woman with so many chronic illnesses that I’ll always need other people’s help, but so irritating that I’m usually left alone.

I had felt like dying in the days leading up to my fortieth birthday. I was afraid that I’d be overwhelmed with depression when it came. But just then, at forty plus one day, I felt happy.

I was sad and lonely and terribly anxious, but on top of it all I was grateful, and in awe, and happy.

The world is so beautiful, with so many things worth loving, and I’ve met so many beautiful people in among the rotten ones.

It’s terrifying to know that the people I trusted to teach me right from wrong turned out to be so evil, but comforting to know that mercy and goodness extend much further than I thought.

I suppose I will be afraid of the vindictive tyrant Jesus until the day I die. I don’t believe I’ll ever make an easy peace between the good things I know about Catholicism and the horrors I’ve seen in the Catholic Church. But I am eager to follow the Jesus of mercy, of invitation and accompaniment, that I’ve found when I lost everything else.

Now I am forty, and to my surprise, I feel I won’t mind living to see fifty. Maybe I’ll even like it.

Autumn continued all around me, a gentle rain of golden leaves as the world grew darker and colder bit by bit.

Life is good. I didn’t think it was, but it’s good.