Cabin Journal: Letting Go

After a summer of chaos, life moving too swiftly for me to absorb everything, I’m happy to settle down now as the seasons change. Although I love summer, a part of me is happy to see it leave. All summer long, I’ve been traveling, including to Illinois to see my mother, who was struggling with dementia and other disabilities that were making her life almost unendurable.

In between trips (including a fun, if hectic, one to Scotland), as much as I could I sought to enjoy summer in the mountains—the three brief months here when life flourishes and the landscape erupts with color: the lime green of the aspens that saturate the valley bottoms and the wildflowers that cover the rocky ground with every possible hue—this year in numbers I’ve rarely seen because of the wet spring. The rivers and creeks are replenished with snowmelt, and the summer birds —house wrens, swallows, hummingbirds—fill the air with their trills and swoops.

I want to absorb it all, because it goes by so quickly. There’s only a short amount of time to get my kayak out on Lily Lake before the water and air gets too cold; a few months to hike to my favorite alpine lakes—Mills, Isabelle—before they start to freeze. There’s hardly enough time to get my fill of the frenetic chipmunks and curious ground squirrels that pose on the front porch.

But now, as the aspens put on their final show before last week’s snowstorm, and after my mother’s death and funeral, I appreciate more strongly than usual how life is slowly being released: the green chlorophyll receding from the aspen, willows and grasses, as the days get shorter and the sunlight decreases, leaving behind golden leaves and yellowing grasses. All the summer birds have left for warmer climates, and the ground squirrels have retreated into their winter dens, soon to be followed by the chipmunks and bears (but hopefully not in the same dens).

The rivers have shrunk back, leaving exposed sandy and rocky shorelines. Only the tall brown skeletons of the angelica—what’s left of summer's thick reddish stalks and white flowers—are proof that wildflowers once covered the valley. Here at the cabin, everything starts to fade away, life turning inward in preparation for winter, as the landscape returns to its brown and beige complexion.

When the cold front moved in last week, winds tore not just leaves but whole branches off trees. As snow and cold descended, the snow dampens all sounds, and silences the churning of the summer chaos. Life retreats, as it does every year, and I work to accept that. There’s peace to be found at the end of summer, as at the end of a life—a release from suffering.

The last of the aspen leaves that have been clinging to the trees let go, slowly descend to the cold, hard ground, where they will crumble into dirt and become part of the earth. Let the snow cover and put an end to all the turmoil. I can hear it in the wind: Let go, let go, let go. Let the stillness descend.