Seasonal Shifts
I love autumn. The changing leaves, the cozy vibes, the layers, the chill. Yes, I love the autumnal aesthetic taking over my Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok feeds, but it’s the way that fall makes me think that truly sets it apart for me.
The first day of fall, in addition to being the infamous birthday of Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins, always signals the coming of change, as the landscapes shift into brilliant hues and the cold weather sets in here in the Northeast. For me, it’s a reminder to get outside as much as I can before the snow arrives and I infuse my cooking with delicata squash, cinnamon, and pumpkin curry. I swap out my flowy dresses for chunky knits and begin to wrap myself tighter in blankets as I drift off to sleep. While I love a good wander through the candle and throw-pillow aisles of Target and Homegoods (now that I can get to them in a handful of minutes instead of an hour and a half) as much as the next millennial woman, the power of fall runs so much deeper than shifts in my lifestyle and home decor. It’s a time to reflect on the season past and turn to the season ahead. This year, that transitional nature of fall resonates with me far more than it ever has before, as Austin and I enter this new season in such a new season of our lives — from the place that we live, to the jobs that we have, to our hopes for the future.
Our life has so much newness right now. We are still figuring out what life in New England looks like, as we make friends and connect with old friends in the area. (Can I just mention how hard it is to make friends as an adult? Even with people you know, we all seem to have schedules that don’t coincide for weeks. That’s a rant for another time, though.) As the seasons change, we’re shifting from those early first days to beyond the surface-level excitement. This place feels more like home and less like a holiday as we dig deep and plant our roots here. Next week will be my last week with St. Lawrence, a job and a place that I love, filled with people I love, but the following week I’ll start a new adventure. I’ll hang up my social media manager hat and take up a digital marketing strategist hat instead. It’ll be a new challenge, with new people, reminding me how much in life is changing, shifting, transforming.
There’s something about each fall that feels familiar, even as each one brings its own context. This fall is like that in the extreme. I feel the familiar chill in the air and wrap myself in beloved sweaters. This weekend we spent a morning at a local apple orchard, picking honey crisps, wandering through pumpkin patches, and rounding out the adventure with fresh apple cider donuts; it was almost exactly what we’d do at a local farm in the North Country. In many ways, the New England fall is the same autumnal experience as the Adirondacks, yet, there are differences if you take the time to notice them. Just like there are differences in us now.
If you don’t look closely, you won’t notice. But if you look deeper, you can see that we aren’t the same people we were last fall. Some things are small, like how no amount of running or pilates can seem to return the flat stomach I had pre-pregnancy and pre-loss. It’s subtle and most people won’t notice, just like most people won’t notice the emotional change in me. How I think of myself had fundamentally changed, as a woman who carried a baby for three months before losing it, and much more importantly, as a woman who can face down the deepest grief she’s ever known, and instead of breaking, blossomed. I carry myself with a confidence I didn’t know I had, and with a strength I thought I’d lost. You might not notice it, not unless you knew what we went through this past June and July. But I notice it, and that makes all the difference.
A few years ago, I seemed to lose a piece of myself, as I navigated some extremely pressured and painful relationships. I lost my confidence, and in the process, the way I both valued and viewed myself. While my strength never went away, as the people in my life reminded me, I lost sight of that side of me that can face anything with grace, and trust in the goodness of the next day. Somehow, losing my baby reunited me with that part of myself. In my early weeks of pregnancy, I couldn’t shake a feeling that something was terribly wrong, that I would never hold my child. I told myself it was early pregnancy anxiety. After all, of my friends who are moms, I know more who have lost a pregnancy than those who have never known the grief of miscarriage. Whether you want to call it women’s intuition or just being realistic about the statistics, the fear that would never see my baby broke my heart and haunted my steps. I remember saying to my mother and to Austin ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose this baby. I can’t lose this baby.’ A few weeks later, of course, I learned that I would. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard, emotionally, mentally, and physically. But that’s when I found her, my strength, my confidence. Myself.
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
The changes in the world around me, the leaves that begin to turn and fall from the trees, remind me of life’s constant movement. The landscape of my life is not stagnant but ever transforming. Each season has its hardships, but each one has its own unique beauty as well. Lord knows this summer had its hardships. It also had deep beauty, whether the simple beauty of a lobster roll on the ocean or the way our loss opened a deep intimacy with friends and family who’ve known the same kind of grief and those who carried our loss with us. This season, too, will surely carry its own trials and triumphs.
With the coming of fall, Austin and I step back into a familiar season, as my doctor gave us the all-clear to start trying to build our family again. There’s anxiety in that, given how long that season lasted and how hard it was the first time around. There’s anxiety, too, that once we conceive it won’t be a healthy pregnancy. Yet, for all the similarities, it isn’t like the first time at all. There is gratitude that my body has healed. Gratitude for my strength, for Austin’s strength, and for the love of the people in our lives. And there’s hope. There’s so much hope in this new season. There’s not the same anxiety about our ability to conceive naturally; instead, we carry an acceptance of the time this season can take and an awareness of the miracle it takes to create and sustain life. Through our grief we’re older, we’re wiser, and we’re more hopeful than I ever would have imagined.
That’s the real power of seasonal shifts. The reminder that all situations and times change, and that we can both weather and enjoy those transformations in ourselves. So yes, I’ll delight in my oversized sweaters and steamy chai lattes from local coffee shops and spend hours wandering through independent bookstores between Boston and Portsmouth. I’ll go hiking in Acadia and leaf peeping in New Hampshire. I’ll bake to my heart’s content and then enjoy crisp runs along the Merrimack river and the ocean. Most of all, I’ll hope to see this season shift and transform into another one, one of carrying new and healthy life within me, soon, but all the while, I’ll delight in the beauty and the joy of this moment, because this life is so very good.
