Bourbon Autumn Simmer Pot

Here we go again. He’s back in town, and I know him by the light.

Every fall the days grow shorter, and something in me notices before the clocks change. There is no dramatic arrival, only a familiarity I wish I did not possess. After decades of his visits, I’m not a fool. I know my history well enough to make room for what returns without letting it believe it has a permanent reservation.

So I have started resetting my house for fall, clearing what has accumulated, putting things in order, moving a few things around and bringing home flowers. From the outside, I suppose it looks like decorating. I know now that it is preparation, a way of taking care of the woman I may need to become before she gets here.

That realization took me somewhere I do not visit often. I grew up in a home where I had very little control over what might greet me on the other side of a door. I learned early to read a room, a face, a voice, and I learned in words and ways that followed me long after I left that I wasn’t worth very much. I was a little girl desperate to be good enough and lovable enough.

How do you crush the spirit of a child so eager to be everything?

Children are defenseless against the people who define them because they do not yet know that adults can be wrong about them. They take what they are given and call it truth, then begin building themselves around it. Growing up may get you out of the house, but it does not necessarily get the house out of you.

I have spent a lifetime doing that work, and I rarely look backward because I fought hard to get this far forward. Distance does not make us bulletproof. The things people say openly can still split the scar tissue, and a stranger can leave a cruel comment and go on with her afternoon, never knowing she has repeated something another woman spent years learning not to believe. Old wounds have extraordinary hearing, but mine no longer have authority.

Once I could choose what surrounded me, I chose deliberately. I wanted warmth in my rooms, laughter around my table and people who felt safe there. I wanted to care for things and people and eventually understand that I belonged on that list. More than anything, I wanted a home that did not feel like waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

Somewhere along the way, creating the life I wanted became one of the ways I learned to live comfortably inside myself. That includes getting dressed. On the days I feel good, I wear the heels, the dress and the lipstick because I know better than to assume tomorrow will feel the same.

Getting dressed so I can face myself in the mirror is not superficial. It’s survival.

I used to feel almost embarrassed by how much small rituals could matter. I know better now. A person who has never needed a particular lifeline is in no position to tell someone else it is decorative. No one else gets to decide which rope was too pretty to have pulled you out.

That is part of why I show these pieces of my life. A camera can capture the dress, the dinner, the flowers and the finished room, but it cannot photograph what it sometimes took to arrive there. Somewhere another woman may be cleaning a drawer, making the bed, putting on lipstick with nowhere to go or buying flowers at the grocery store. She may think she is accomplishing almost nothing when, in fact, she is finding small ways to remain present in her own life.

Most survival does not look heroic while you are doing it.

This year, I am preparing earlier because I know what the changing light can bring, and pretending otherwise has never protected me from it. There is no wisdom in being surprised by a storm that has appeared on the same horizon for decades. Knowing where I am vulnerable is no longer something I consider weakness. It is information, and I intend to use it.

For most of my life, history meant the things that happened to me and the things I was taught to believe. Time has given me another history alongside it: every year I made it through, every morning I eventually got up, every version of myself I found again and every season that finally loosened its grip. The past contains evidence of what can hurt me, but it also contains decades of evidence that I survive.

God willing, the light will change again, and one day I will realize our unwanted houseguest has packed his bags without my noticing him leave. Until then, I will prepare this house and myself with the tenderness neither of us always received. I can respect the past without allowing it to become prophecy, and I can make room for what I cannot control without surrendering what I can.

I was once a little girl living inside a life other people created for her. She grew up and learned that what she had been handed was not what she had to keep.

Now I get to create the life I want to live.