Quickly now, we’re moving into November and late autumn. October seems to have come and gone in a hurry. Dating back to late September, it has been a whopping six weeks since all three of us spent a weekend together here at home (counting two weekends on-service for me, two weekends in Baltimore and solo-dadding, and two weekends on the road in Cape Cod and New Hampshire). Autumn colours have been strange here this year, as they have been all over New England. In some pockets, there was early colour and early leaf drop. In other places, the changes have seemed to last and linger; the red maples around our house here in Brookline are putting on the best display we have seen in our years living here. Overall, the foliage has been patchier than most autumns, owing to yet another summer of severe drought. But at last, the oaks and birches are having their moment, and the ground is as crisp and golden as each morning’s air. The region’s hardwood forests - and their flora and fauna - are just as beautiful as always if you get out there and look.
Aside from the visual landscape, autumn has been strange this year for me, for another reason altogether. At work, sweeping upcoming changes in the landscape of Boston palliative care mean that I find myself making a series of long-range career decisions where the tradeoffs are clear and present. I am quite used to thinking about the future, and about change; I’ve written ad nauseum, it seems, about the dreams I have (of dying), and the awareness of impermanence that permeates my everyday life and my creative energy. And yet - it is rare for me to be quite literally writing the future: putting visions down on paper and knowing they will affect me and many people around me. Always too soon, the time draws near when I’ll have to make some weighty decisions. And thankfully, I think I am someone who has processed this moment long enough (and gone through enough therapy and self-therapy) to know roughly where I stand. That does very little to diminish the weight of the decisions, though. Nor the emotional toll.
For now though, the fall rolls onward, and the year marches toward its end. On the docket: a train trip to NYC, more grandparent time; a year-end visit to California. As the days grow shorter and the nights grow darker, I begin to close in on the things that really matter. Wool socks, a good book by lamplight, Jordan growing up beneath our roof and our watchful gaze. A certain spaciousness and clarity that comes with the cold weather and barren trees. Open sightlines, long horizons. Maybe, one of these days, a future to call one’s own.
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October 31, 2025: Jordan’s third Halloween, trick-or-treating up and down the residential streets here in North Brookline with his bestie from daycare. We have matching costumes (a zombie family), which of course means that Jordan will wear his mask for no longer than two minutes before removing it permanently. He’s been talking about eating our (and everyone’s) brains for the past half year - our little zombie, developing quite the forceful personality.
November 1, 2025: A morning spent at the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA, which I visited with my field naturalist cohort almost exactly a year ago. In the Trailside Museum, Jordan enjoys seeing the venomous snakes, playing with binoculars and slide, and meeting the nature center’s rehabbing animals. He self-determines that he should buy a stretchy frog from the museum gift shop; when we point out that he does not have his own cash or credit card, and ask him who will be paying for him, he turns to the cashier and asks, “Can you buy it for me?” The kind man very nearly does. We take a brief walk up the nearby trailhead to take a family portrait (our first in awhile), and Jordan builds a “leaf house” for his stretchy frog before we head home by way of Panda Express in Dedham, MA.
