I feel like my garden looks. A bit overgrown, unruly. Goldenrod spreading and hanging over more modest plants. Asters coming into 
their own but falling over as if to spread their beauty. The cherry tomato plant pumping out the last fruit of the season…a little smaller and more irregularly shaped. A bit of chaos I think I should do something about.
Vulnerability
is an interesting visitor. It comes with the unexpected, with events you can’t control. A native plant with its own notions of how it should be, a death, the changes of aging, the space of retirement…. Always there is a perceived loss: of routine, of control, a change that shifts your life in some way you don’t quite understand. If this could happen, what else?
You tighten waiting for the proverbial “other shoe to drop.¨ You feel suspended in the in between times. You long for what you only remember as being neat and orderly.
It’s too easy for me in times of change to try and control everything. I hover over those I care about. I pull in. My mind gallops along, running the race of its life, planning for everything. How do I divide the ‘Autumn Joy’ Sedum, maybe there are native flowers that don’t grow to 6 ft. tall. If I can figure out the perfect plants…
But then I go back out to the garden and remember. The uncontrolled, the wild and untamed can be 
beautiful if you stop thinking it should be something else. If I let go of the “shoulds” about gardens, the memories of how it was when it was new and tame, the fear of what it will morph into, I see the beauty of it just as it is. It’s the judging that robs the seasons of their beauty, and most importantly, their place in life.
Fall teaches us to hold on lightly, to let go of what’s done, to love what is. I’m letting it sink in.
I sit waiting—
Do you sell the house? Can you envision living without them? Retirement becomes a reality; work receding into the background. The stock market once again prunes the money tree you thought would bear you fruit.
