“Each golden day was cherished to the full, for one had the feeling that each must be the last. Tomorrow it would be winter.”  - Elizabeth Enright

It's that.  And it's more than that. This changing season feels more than just a turn of the weather sometimes.  

I spent this whole day at home. It was the first in many, many days although the journeys out have been wonderful.  There has been lots of listening lately.  Old friends, new friends, passing acquaintance, sweet children making big lives.  Whispered wishes, tentative plans, bitter regrets all mingling and mixing and floating in the air.  By days' end sometimes you need to just let all those words settle down into your heart, rather than stirring them up.  So it's been quiet over here in this space. 

We went to a house party a few days back and I found myself between a former Russian actress and her Irish husband.  He told me stories about working as a UN aid worker, being taken captive in Beirut years ago, about how that thing where they put a gun to your head and they shoot and it turns out to be a blank and you're still alive?  How that happens for real.   

The actress?  Oh my.  At 68, she has outlived two husbands and still has the energy of a teenager.   She lit up the room with her tales, each more improbable than the last and all likely true.  Then she demanded to know everyone's birthdates being, among a dozen other things, an armchair astrologer.  She came to mine, looked me in the eye and said in her thick accent ahh, so you're on the cusp.  

I do not follow the stars for my fate but yes, she was onto one thing for sure.  The cusp. The point of transition between two different states, Webster says.  I am trusting it is, as always, the verge of good. That the seasons of our lives are marching along in their intended order. That it's all just a change in the type of beautiful. 

That these are golden days and should be cherished to the full.