Behind the Puddle

I don’t know exactly what autumn will bring behind the puddle.

I know what I expect. Cooler mornings. Changing leaves. Different birds. Quieter days. Eventually bare trees and a view that looks nothing like the one I have been watching all summer. But I don’t actually know.

This is the first year I have watched this place quite like this.

I’ve lived here through plenty of autumns. I just haven’t noticed one from this chair before. That makes me curious. What will stay? What will leave? Who will arrive? What will I notice once the leaves are gone that I couldn’t see when the trees were full? There is something hopeful about not knowing.

I don’t always feel that way about uncertainty. Usually I would prefer answers. Hope and uncertainty aren’t always comfortable companions.

When we hope for something specific, uncertainty can feel almost unbearable. We want the test result. The phone call. The decision. The answer. We want to know whether the thing we desperately want is going to happen.

And sometimes hope becomes tangled up with believing that everything will work out the way we want.

I’ve lived long enough to know that it doesn’t always. Some endings don’t lead to something better. Some losses remain losses. Some things cannot be fixed. Some doors close and we would have preferred they stayed open.

So I don’t think hope can depend on a promise that everything ahead will be good. Maybe hope is quieter than that. Maybe hope simply leaves room.

Room for something we haven’t imagined yet. Room for another conversation. Another morning. Another person. Another possibility. Another way of understanding what has happened. Another version of ourselves. Another season.

The trees losing their leaves isn’t evidence that spring is guaranteed to look exactly the way they would like. It is simply part of what comes next. And what comes next will contain things that cannot exist in this season.

That’s true of our lives too.

There are things I love today that I don’t want to lose. People. Routines. Places. Ways of being together. I would happily negotiate with time about several of them.

But if nothing ever changed, there would also be things I would never get to meet. People I don’t know yet. Stories that haven’t happened. Things the girls haven’t grown into. Things Brian and I haven’t experienced. Things I haven’t learned. Versions of myself I haven’t become.

Even behind the puddle, there may be a bird I haven’t seen yet. A visitor I don’t know to watch for. A moment I couldn’t possibly plan.

Hope doesn’t require me to know what those things are. Maybe it just asks me not to decide in advance that because something is ending, nothing meaningful can exist beyond it.

September is shortening the days. Summer is releasing its hold. And somewhere inside that ending, autumn is already beginning. Not better. Not worse. Different. Maybe that is enough for hope.

There is more ahead. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether all of it will be easy. But I haven’t met all of my life yet. And I think I would like to leave some room for what I haven’t seen.