Autumn Comes Quietly Here
Autumn doesn’t announce itself in Florida. There is no blaze of turning leaves, no first cold morning that sends you hunting for a sweater. The sycamore tree outside my dad’s window lets go of a few tired leaves that collect on the ground. You have to go looking for the season here… a thinner light in the afternoon, a little mercy in the heat, mornings that arrive slower and softer than they did in July.
I have gotten good at looking around. Caring for my father has taught me that.
His days and mine move at the same pace now, slow, unhurried. But not in that nostalgic way. That stage has passed, all too quickly. There is the morning coffee, poured the way he likes it, but I’m not sure he would know if it wasn’t. There are the hearing aids, and the small negotiation over whether he’ll wear them. There are no more of the stories I have heard a hundred times — and would give anything to hear just once more. There are brief periods of wakefulness, and long periods of sleep. 12 or more hours at a time. 20-plus hours in a day. Ninety-one years old, and I would give anything for a little more of his fantastic sense of humor. Now, the most I can get from him is a smile in the morning, when I wake him up with an enthusiastic “GOOD MORNING” conveying energy and joy I don’t always feel.
I left one version of my life to come and sit in this one, and I would not trade it. It is also stretching me in a way I have never been stretched.
Here is what the slow turn of autumn keeps trying to tell me. The important things rarely arrive with a blaze. They come quietly — hand in hand with the painful ones. Is today the ordinary Friday I’ll miss the most? Is today the best he will ever be? Probably. Tomorrow there will be less of him. Something made me think of the part in Shall We Dance? when Susan Sarandon’s character sits with the private investigator, talking about why people get married. Obviously my situation isn’t marriage, but the sentiment applies. Beverly tells him that what we really want is someone to witness our lives… that with billions of people on the planet, it’s easy to wonder what any one life really means, and that to love someone is to promise to care about all of it, the good and the bad and the mundane, every single day. Her line stays with me: “Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.”
All I can do is witness, and love, but if I spend the season waiting for something dramatic, announced, I will walk right past all the beauty around me.
I try to pay more attention. I notice the leaves the sycamore drops, and I notice the ones my father is letting go of too… strength, hearing, the names of things…and I try to meet each day as its own small gift.
Some mornings it’s easy. Some mornings it is the hardest thing I do.
What holds me on the hard mornings is not my own steadiness…I run out of that before 9am. It is the old and stubborn promise that mercy resets overnight, that whatever I spent yesterday is replenished before I wake. Lamentations says it better than I can (3:22–23): “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”
New every morning. Like the light. Like the slow, unhurried Florida autumn that some days I barely notice.
The maples up north will be spectacular this month and next, and I will not see them. I will see one sycamore, one old man, and a season that changes so gently you could miss it if you weren’t watching for it.
I am watching. And I am learning. That is the whole of it. Gratefully.
Joy is a Catholic life coach and the founder of Rooted in Joy Coaching, where she walks alongside women standing at a threshold — a transition, a turning, a season quietly changing. If you’re being asked to grow through a season you didn’t choose, you don’t have to do it alone. Schedule a discovery call.
Dad’s sycamore
