This morning, collard leaves are covered with frost that shines in the first sunlight. The hawkweed and grasses in the yard are stiff and glazed with white.

And even though I lugged the tall ladder out of the garage in last evening’s fading light, and clambered all through the bushy dahlia stems, stuck the old roof-rake handle and a few tall sticks into the flower bed, and tossed flannel sheets over all the lush summery growth so it would be safe from the cold, this morning the leaves are wilted and black. The sheets are stiff with frost. So it’s probably the end of the lush beauty, of so many summer colorful blooms.

The ending of so many things.

Today, my friend Eleanor leaves her mid-coast Maine farmhouse, where she’s lived for over 60 years. She needs more help than is close-at-hand, will have to settle into a new living facility down closer to her daughter in Texas. An adventure, I keep telling her. And also a loss.

So many things are loosening their hold, giving way to the inevitable.

And what can I do, but love. Keep in touch. Visit, call, send little notes, check in to see how her new adventure is going. We are all, as Ram Dass said, “just walking each other home.”

It’s one of the things I love about aging. A great grace, tucked into the mess of small everyday losses of getting older.

This past year, visiting my Louisiana home, I walked out into the yard to see how things were growing, and reflected on that truth. Here’s a little entry from that day –

Oct. 10 –
I stop by the house, am happy to see the garden that is wild with flowers despite the recent storm – yellow hibiscus and blue bog sage still in bloom, the red passionflower vine climbing all over the fence. I work for a while at the fallen hackberry tree that my neighbor Rusty has cut into chunks, pick up small branches and tug them toward the ditch. My skirt gets snagged on little twigs, my shoes smudged with mud, but I so love this earthy work – bending, lifting, trekking back and forth over the long grass in the gusty wind. Rusty comes over for a chat while I work – says he’ll do the rest tomorrow, take it all back to the end of the field and burn what he can. And his bees are doing fine, he says. He’s thinking of adding another hive or two.

We talk about life, and aging and how it’s changed us – how everything is love – how those so-many little ways we all squabbled over stupid things, or judged each other (better, or worse), are washing away. We have so little time…..

While we talk,
sun spills over
the forever-green,
the all-around green,
the grass the grass,
the bent-over hissing-wind-grass

Especially in the wretched work of grief, in this stumbling world, in these unsettled times, on this glorious but challenged Earth, we are surely all walking each other home.

May we all remember, and be glad.