WILLIAMSVILLE — Autumn comes and boasts that elegant slate blue to hang a backdrop for the changing leaves. And each time it comes, I'm shaken by the harbingers of winter, touched by mortality. The windows close; socks and shoes go on, a fire is built, and it's time. Time to go inward again.
Each year that I do this folding in, I'm aware that I have a little less time to do what I need to do before winter.
I don't feel older, actually, despite a knee that quits at inconvenient times and eyes that will never again be entertained in the shower by the fine print on Dr. Bronner's bottles. It's harder to hear and a little tougher to hold the down dog in yoga, but I still dance to anything and party with the best of them.
No, this autumn, something finite is signaled not in me, but in the face of my mother. Twenty-nine years older than I, she talks now about calling a priest to talk plans, about where she'd prefer to die, about not ordering a quantity of hearing-aid batteries.
“I doubt we'll need that many,” she says.
What does that feel like? To look down the highway only to see that where the road meets the sky at the horizon, the road just ends? What does it feel like to parcel out favorite bureaus, significant earrings, and special prints? What keeps my mother awake at night? What lets her go to sleep?
I've not entertained these worries before, but as I am 60 and she is 89, winter seems closer and colder.
* * *
My niece was to be married in September in northern Italy, so a few of us family and my friend Charlie made it a mission to get my mother there.
With a portable wheelchair and all the necessities, we flew from Boston to Zurich to Venice, and we made sure she didn't miss anything that would make her happy.
We toured a couple days in Venice, where she'd never been. In what might be the world's worst city for wheelchairs, she had a daring water taxi ride, a tour of the Grand Canal via vaporetto, and a roll through the Piazza San Marco.
Harry's Bar was packed with tourists like us - all wanting to channel Hemingway - so we posed my mother outside with the door's signage a backdrop for a keepsake photo. Smiling from her chariot, she raised a hand to wave for the camera.
We then drove to Gaiarine in the foothills of the Dolomites, where Isabella and Alessandro were to be married. My mother was a superstar there. The only grandparent alive, she was everyone's darling; she even garnered her own welcome from the American co-celebrant at the start of the bilingual Mass.
Though she's always dodged public display, my mother basked in the attention and beamed at the ceremony. It was so genuinely and comfortably Catholic, so beautifully and elegantly done, that I'd almost wished I were a Roman Catholic again myself.
We witnesses walked from the church up the road to the villa, where the reception filled several rooms on the courtyard of the home that has been in Alessandro's family for centuries. The company and the food, architecture, flowers, trees, music - everything - sparked a “pinch me.” It seemed an event that one could write about - an invention - but never really live.
The cake was cut and served, the dancing then began, and, as my mother wistfully watched, I saw in her eyes the envy of youth laced with love for her granddaughter - and for her whole family and the new family we'd just joined.
Many dreams had been dashed in her younger years. This day may have made up for a few.
“I want to say I danced at Isabella's wedding,” my mother whispered to me as the evening played on. “Do you think Charlie would dance with me?”
Of course, Charlie would do that and anything else for her. Inviting her to the floor, he held her safely in a proper ballroom stance and swayed her gently, side to side.
As she beamed at him - and with the thoughts of dances past, I'm sure - dozens of cameras clicked to document the dance, to tell all about nearly-90 “Nonna” who danced at Isabella and Alessandro's wedding.
* * *
One dance led to two and a few gentle turns to vary the pattern. And then it was time to go, to take Cinderella back to assisted living in Vermont.
Mom's home now. She's been a little ill and is more than a little crestfallen.
But she trusts the memories.
A smart cookie, she knows they'll be good fuel as winter paces on.