While I was working, fall arrived. Some leaves had turned and the air crisped. Fall is my favorite season. Its not just the colors or the pure quality of the air. I like bearing armor again: boots, long sleeves, and a heavy coat. I like the respite from the searing light. I like that when I go out at night, it’s actually dark, and dark clothes and lipstick aren’t unfavorably bright. All kinds of memories are associated with fall. These worst and best things are entertained in equanimity, though, against the more durable sensory experience of the season.

On Saturday I packaged up the manuscript and sent it away. After a long evening nap, Andrew helped me celebrate the accomplishment with drinks at Barca, then coffee at Aurafice, and late-night food at the Hurricane Café. The Hurricane no longer serves music, but the food is surprisingly decent and the portions modest and practical.

Two weekends ago, Pam and I hiked to Cutthroat Lake. We pitched the tent not far from the lake and stayed for a night. I was tired from the working and swollen with time, so I slept for two hours and she read until I woke up. Then we explored the lake, a diminutive water that she called a meadow in progression. We walked carefully over bogs and crawled over boulders, warding off branches most of the way. And when we returned, it was dinnertime. She’d packed in a bottle of wine and some bread and wedges of roquefort and gouda. We sat, garbed in fleece and reclined into our bogus Thermarest chairs, eating and drinking by candlelantern light. In the safety of the remote backcountry, the Milky Way emerged prominent and nebulous. With it came even the shyest stars. Later we laughed at silly things that are no longer funny. In the morning she woke me with coffee and we sat again in our little chairs cooking pancakes. The packing and walking out were easy from rest and caffeinated exhilaration.

I learned from the hike that the iliotibial problems that began with the STP aren’t improving. My knees are still tender and now my left hip hurts with each weight-bearing stride. I had another hike planned for this weekend, but after the short hike I wasn’t sure I should do it. So, on Monday, I ran for twenty minutes, which aggravated the injury and confirmed the need to cancel the trip. I went to the doctor and got a referral to a physical therapist. I’m stretching every day. I’m only swimming now and going to yoga on Wednesdays.

Last year at this time Andrew and I were in Bend. It was the morning of the eleventh when I drove in to meet him. We stayed there a week while the skies were quiet. Yesterday I wanted to be away again, so I asked him to drive away with me. I didn’t know where would be a good place to go but we ended up going to Mount St. Helens. He’d never been and I don’t go as often as I’d like. The mountain was bare of snow and entirely ashen for miles. Every once in awhile a tiny plume of smoke blemished the cloudless sky above the crater. I couldn’t tell if it was steam exuded from the lava dome or wind-borne ash swept from the naked flanks. The mountain is always breathtaking.

In a recent conversation, Andrew said that, in his experience, women act as though they want to be the highlight of the lives of the men with whom they are involved. If I’m honest with myself, I can feel that urge in me. I’ve certainly recognized the behavior in others. It’s part of that package of behaviors associated with low self-esteem. So many of us lack a sense of certainty about our being, it seems. And we project that self-forgetting onto others and assign them the impossible responsibility of making us eternally paramount. I like what Paul Ford wrote about this. (See the third paragraph from the bottom.) I wish I’d illustrated this insight as well as he does. (At least I can link to him.) In my experience, the potency of past relationships does subside in the presence of newer and more fulfilling, and therefore stronger, relationships. And when the old memories of past love affairs do resurface in nostalgia, it only signals a current dissatisfaction, which subsides if I can dare to face it head on. And then the memories return to a more balanced arrangement, where the undoing is the pattern by which the soft, loving memories are set.