Autumn

I think it would be best if you would click the arrow above so you can listen to the music while you read this. I am listening to it as I write. I know the album is called “December” but this is perfect autumn music. It is one of my all time favorite albums by George Winston. This first piece is my favorite and I usually listen to this one piece over and over and over. It makes me feel melancholy like autumn days. All of the music is beautiful, but this one piece…

I have been thinking about this experiment a lot. It is a very good thing for me to be doing but as it already has, today, it will be shape-shifting along the way throughout the year. It is a search for happiness, not happiness found. Some days I will have to stretch to find these moments, each day I will record golden moments and sweet memories, or a spark of light in a sometimes otherwise dark day, but I will continue to reach toward the light. Sometimes there will be poignant moments as I have a dip in mood — not necessarily a bad thing, but reality — and that is fine. I said in the first post in this series that I would not mention mental illness, and no, I will certainly not be focusing on that at all, but it was foolish to think I wouldn’t have to talk about it along the way. I am a woman who was very recently living in such darkness for months on end that I didn’t think I could ever find my way out. This project has already made me feel more hopeful about my future, and I will continue to search for happiness each and every day. This experiment also hopes to help others who are suffering or struggling to find joy and healing even in small moments. But it must be a realistic search.

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Cool, crisp “sweater weather” is coming, and wine sweet apples. I miss so many things I grew up with in the midwest, the changing of the leaves, the cooler weather sooner. Here on the coast of North Carolina we don’t have that. I am a woman prone to melancholy and it just fits with this season. Yesterday on Facebook I had a lovely time asking people to share their childhood memories about things they had that made them happy, toys, playthings, especially of the period now called retro, the 1950’s, when I was born. I am going to devote a whole post to this subject because it was so sweet, it made me smile, and laugh. I started out, in a wistful mood, searching on Google for playground equipment from the 50’s because I remembered, with such joy, the things they used to call merry-go-rounds. Today you wouldn’t find them on a playground anywhere! They were not deemed safe somewhere along the line, but they are one of my happy memories. The things that stick in your mind. And the funny thing is that one memory that makes me nearly squee with delight was for a thing called Creepy Crawlers. (The link will take you to a 1960’s commercial for the toy!) More than one person wrote in to say both that they had had Creepy Crawlers and loved them but that they wouldn’t be considered safe today! Gracious, how did we ever make it through childhood? I was about 10 when I had mine. It was such an innocent time. Today there are 10 year olds with cell phones! It’s hard to wrap my mind around. (Of course I grew up using an abacus to learn math! There weren’t even calculators then!)

What happened for me in that Facebook thread was something wonderful. As people mentioned more things that I had completely forgotten about it sparked such moments of joy for me. You see because of abuse that went on for many years there are black holes all over my childhood, I don’t remember most of my gradeschool years at all. But there were good times too and I want to be able to recover those. I have lived in fear of childhood memories for so long, those years were like a field full of landmines, better not to go back there at all. But as people shared their memories it was like a switchboard lighting up, a memory here, a memory there. I laughed outloud. What joy it brought me to remember so many things, from memories of my dear little grandma, short, roly-poly, wild wirey hair, and the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. I flashed on a memory of when she used to make donuts in her little 1930’s kitchen. My cousins and I would stand on chairs to watch her drop the donuts in the big pot of grease, and she would let us eat “the holes” while she made the rest of the donuts. Oh my it makes me happy to remember that. And I remember my grandfather, who died when I was 6, putting me up on a stool next to him so I could watch him shave. He had one of those big white mugs and mixed up that thick, rich lather with one of those big brushes! And do you remember the original Colorforms? Before they made them all cartoony? There were pages of shapes and you had to build things yourself. And paper dolls, and hula hoops, and playdoh — oh the smell — and so many more things.

I think I’m having kind of a childhood memory hangover today. Lovely, sweet memories I am so glad to have, but they don’t fit comfortably in the landscape of my memories of that time overall. I have heard so often that the best thing you can give a child is a happy childhood full of wonderful childhood memories. Mine was mixed, and often dark and scary. But I am determined to unearth more happy memories and try to focus on them. I have surely done enough therapy over several decades to deal with the other. Now I want to remember merry-go-rounds, and Creepy Crawlers, and playdoh, and all the rest.

Would you help me? Would you share some of your happy childhood memories here? I would love to hear them. I think they would help us all enormously. This time of year can be very hard for many people with the changing of the seasons and the dark coming early. Let’s share and celebrate our happy memories. You can help me call in more memories to light up the switch board in my brain. When I ask you for a happy childhood memory what’s the first thing that comes to mind? And when I ask you to tell me about your favorite toys or playthings when you were little, what are they? And you can come back again and again and leave more notes here if you remember more things later. No matter what our childhood looked like, let’s dig for the gold that are that happy times that surely were there too. Those are the things I want to drift through my days with this autumn. How about you?

Much love to you all. You are all stars in the firmament of my life and I appreciate you more than I can say…