Up, then Down

What a difficult week this has been. Between the endless Palin hysteria (I can scarcely believe that Frank Rich has concluded that this is a right wing conservative ‘Manchurian Candidate’ plot: where is Frank Sinatra when we need him?), the financial meltdown, the ricocheting market, and the beginning of fall—the psychologically dark season—it’s hard to know how—or whether-- to lift one’s head off the pillow in the early morning. Of course, it is somewhat easier up here, whether in the isolated exclave or in British Columbia. In either place, I am free from newspapers and U.S. television, but not, of course, from the falling leaves nor the internet.

Fall always starts in early September up here with a great uplifting feeling: it’s crisp, blue-skied, windy, and beautiful, and that sense of everything beginning again will return. But at the moment, we’re in the other part of fall’s beginning: the part in which the skies turn gray and the temperature rises very little during the day, given the absence of the sun, and the house is cold because you are trying to put off lighting the pilot. This is the first reminder of the coming of seasonal affective disorder. How funny is it that they managed to find a phrase with the acronym SAD? If women who spend long period of times alone with their young children without any support from other adults were deemed to have a psychological disorder, we could call it MAD (motherhood affective disorder); or perhaps young boys who are overexposed to violence could have boyhood affective disorder (yes, BAD). We could go on here with CAD, DAD, FAD, GAD, etc., but we won’t.

The various quilting groups that I belong to are planning their goals for the year, looking at new possibilities for exhibits and community works. In Point Roberts, we need to finish the two quilts we are making for the local library’s walls, pieces that have been too long in the making; in B.C., we are thinking of taking on the challenge of wearable art, a move to the left (or right) from quilting, since wearable art does not need to have the heavy batting and stitched quilting that defines a quilt. In both these groups, it is clearly the fall that is bringing us to reassess where we are and where we are going.

This planning and reassessment task brought by fall may have made the world’s events much more difficult this past week: how do you think about where you are going when disaster seems to be right in front of you. Where you are going seems to be like some kind of crash immediately ahead. Where you are going doesn’t seem to be a question you really want to ask.

Today, the gray skies have turned into rain showers; tomorrow, they will themselves have decided where they’re going and will turn into more serious rain. But I am reminding myself, regularly, that all this, too, will pass and that the day will come when we will be asking whatever happened to Sarah Palin in the same way that we might ask whatever happened to Dan Quayle if we cared enough to ask.

Those whom the Gods would destroy, I remind myself, first they raise high. This is the end of the ‘raise high’ part, I think. The tree leaves, the summer flowers, the long summer nights, Sarah Palin, Wall Street wizards…all on their way down. Good-bye!