The Expedition

We gathered a very few miles from the state line early Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, for our traditional hunt for the perfect Christmas tree. It was uneventful until we got home and prepared to unload the tree, which had been lashed to the luggage rack.

Focused on grabbing my gloves from the back of the car, I leaned forward on the last stride.

Noticing that the raised hatch was bending the top of the tree, he began to close it.

Physics set in, and then biology (or was it physiology?) Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Head wounds bleed.

I stop, suddenly, then stagger backward, several slow steps. Later, he can't stop laughing as he imitates my slow, crouching, backward stagger. Neither can I.

I feel my head. A shallow groove in the skin, the image of a trench. No puncture, no slice. A formed depression, and it's wet. Yep, my fingers are bright red.

After the bleeding has slowed to an ooze, they take turns looking at the wound as I help part my hair around it. I don't think you need stitches, she says. That's good news, because just the thought of that hurts. You could use a butterfly bandage, he says, and I start laughing again. Would it stick to all the hair? Or require a shave?

Laughter is great medicine; the healing begins.

All fall down

Now this is seasonal. But, didn't we just do this? Was it really a year ago that we were raking up leaves and hauling them out to the curb for pickup?

The dogs don't like it one bit. All their drop zones have disappeared, and they don't seem to like even walking through the growing cover of damp leaves - can't say that I blame them on that score. So for these several weeks they have been leaving little packages in unexpected places, often and predictably discovered by attracting an unsuspecting sole. Thus the evening scrape-and-scrub routine reaches its peak pretty much in sync with the height of the leaves' migration earthward.

If I were John Updike, I would write a poem about this microseasonal phenomenon. But, alas, you can guess the rest. So we lean into the mundane, comfortable annual rites of autumn, trudging - carefully - into longer nights and toward the promise of new leaves next spring.