Shedding

There are moments in life when you know you need to release things, clean out the closets, empty out the basement, brush the bats from your head. This moment comes for me most often in August. Because in August, Mother Nature has exceeded all sense: trees genuflect under the burden of leaves, flowers crowd one another into suffocation, roads blister and bubble under the relentless assault of the sun, and I can only survive by being less.

So the pink chiffon mini-dress worn to my oldest brother’s high school graduation goes, and the stack of New Yorker magazines from 1994 go into recycling, and old bottles of moisturizer and nail polish and tax returns from 1987 are tossed into the trash and restraint starts to slip. Until the thing I most want to cast off, is, well, everything.

This is the season of cutting back the overgrowth, of seeing what needs to be removed from the garden, of tearing down the deck and building a boat to sail away on. This is the season to realize the other woman actually is the best woman for him. And I am not. This is the season of withdrawal, retreat, release. Dig out the documents you thought would define you in your death and realize that at that point, you’ve either done the job or not.

This is the season to tear up my crappy off-white carpet and finally learn to put down wood floors. This is the season to put the antique sewing machine on Craigslist. This is the season to put the decrepit rhododendron in the ground in the woods and wish it the best.

Every morning now, I see the red fox who has raced the woods behind my house. This year, the fox is narrow, the red is redolent with silver and he walks where he would not normally, exposing himself to the civilized world. My most cherished vision of this same fox comes in winter, in the pre-dawn, slipping auburn through the white snow like a flame. And I want to keep the fox in winter.

So I don’t really want to cast off everything. Not everything. Not my antique vanity. Not my son or daughter or dog. Not my favorite sleep shirt or the smell of a distant fire or the sensation of a wonderful kiss or the remembrance of being cradled.

But it is August. So I want to release styling my hair, and smiling at bigots just to be polite, or dumbing down my intelligence to appear cute, or appearing interested in anything superficial. It is as if my flesh were peeled off, so the tendon and sinew and muscle stands, sentry yet vulnerable.

So the best thing to do is scrape away the barnacle, the rust; toss the debris. But like the fox, I don’t want to close the door but rather walk the rim of the crest, narrow and silver highlighting my hair, and know that I am still the fox. And if the August drought lets up, I’ll make it to the winter snow.