Here’s the puzzle I started on the Autumn Equinox and finished this morning. This is the second stop on my journey around the Wheel of the Year by myself. And a little trip down memory lane with some photos from past celebrations. Enjoy!
2021 ~ Old Mystic, Connecticut
Clyde’s Cider Mill
The two main things we used to do to celebrate the equinox were apple picking at Holmberg’s Orchard and picking up freshly pressed apple cider and pumpkin bread at Clyde’s Cider Mill. At home Tim used to make me a great cup of hot cider with cinnamon sugar on the rim of the cup. And although I don’t have too many pictures of leaf beds, an autumn day wouldn’t be complete without a walk through the ‘fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves‘ in the woods. 🍂
2020 ~ Holmberg Orchards, Ledyard, Connecticut
2020 ~ Holmberg Orchards
2016 ~ Holmberg Orchards ~ hanging gourds
2016 ~ Holmberg Orchards
It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! Painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence… How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. ~ Henry David Thoreau (Autumnal Tints)
Probably the father brought his offspring to this backyard suet feeder on a sultry summer day…
fledgling red-bellied woodpecker
I think the most important quality in a birdwatcher is a willingness to stand quietly and see what comes. Our everyday lives obscure a truth about existence — that at the heart of everything there lies a stillness and a light. ~ Lynn Thomson (Birding with Yeats: A Memoir)
Absence disembodies — so does Death Hiding individuals from the Earth Superstition helps, as well as love — Tenderness decreases as we prove — ~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #904)
Except the smaller size No lives are round — These — hurry to a sphere And show and end — The larger — slower grow And later hang — The Summers of Hesperides Are long. ~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #606)
“Woman Seated Beneath a Tree” by Gustave Caillebotte
Some people take their troubles to a particular tree and gain refreshment and solace from its company; others derive inspiration from sitting at its foot or in its branches; still others have discovered that trees are truly mediators between the worlds, living bridges between our apparent world and the unseen realms of the otherworld. When we approach a tree, we need to slow down our breathing, slow down our rapid pace, our mental busyness, in order to be attuned to the spirit of the tree itself. … With our heart, we ask the tree to show us part of its nature. … We listen and give thanks. Even when we are just passing a tree, not visiting, we can still send out a greeting to it. ~ Caitlín Matthews (The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year)
5.14.26 ~ Elm Grove Cemetery, Mystic, Connecticut photo by Larisa
It rained all day on May 14th. I didn’t take a single picture for the entire day. But I’m glad Larisa captured this last moment Finn had with his Grandpa, checking to see how heavy his ashes were. The two of them shared a birthday and were two peas in a pod. I will never forget how much fun it was to watch them playing together.
I chose to bury Tim’s ashes in Elm Grove Cemetery because it is located in the county where we lived for 47 years of our marriage, and because the plot was purchased by my 2nd-great-grandfather, who lies buried there with his own parents and great-grandparents and other relations. They all also lived in southeastern Connecticut, and there is still room there to bury ashes, so it seemed like a good choice. Tim & I took many walks in this beautiful cemetery, which sits on the banks of the Mystic River, just north of Mystic Seaport.
We may fear change or we may embrace it, but the planets turn, life goes on, the Great Cycles continue. These cycles move Nature and our lives through death and rebirth, through containment and release, through holding and letting go. The seed pod tightens and hardens around its precious cargo, then it breaks and releases the new life into the waiting earth. ~ Philip Carr-Gomm (Inspiration for Life, May 25, 2026)
image credit: Wolf Rock Nature Preserve website
Later in the day we all drove up to Wolf Rock in Mansfield, our northeastern Connecticut hometown, to scatter some of Tim’s ashes along with the remaining ashes he had kept of his brother, Toby. Still raining, it was a quarter-mile hike up very rocky and very muddy terrain through the woods to the glacial erratic where Tim and his brothers used to hang out as teens. Tim and Josh scattered some of Toby’s ashes here in December 2013, but now Dan, Matt and Jed had a chance to be here to scatter the rest of them.
The next day, on May 15th, we held an afternoon celebration of life at the Zbierski House at “our” little city beach. Besides the family, we were now joined by old friends and neighbors and lots of Tim’s buddies from the ham radio clubs he belonged to. It was wonderful. I had spent weeks working on a slide show of Tim’s life which was playing on a TV continuously and started many pleasant conversations and quite a few trips down memory lane…
photo by Jenn
Below is one of my favorite pictures, taken before the first heart attack and the battle with heart disease began. The fun, empty nest, middle-aged period of our lives. He was 51 and only just beginning to go gray…
Tim in our kitchen, 2004
Zbierski House at Eastern Point Beach ~ photo by Jenn
I feel more settled now that Tim’s ashes have been returned to the earth and that his family got to be together to say good-bye. The trip was grueling for me physically but somehow I made it and the emotional healing was worth the effort. I’m still incredibly sad and lonely for him but am learning how to carry the grief. How to take walks without him pointing things out to me…
I think my last hurdle will be resuming family history research. It’s going to be hard not having him in the next room, doing ham radio stuff, but always ready to drop everything when I came in to share new discoveries with him. I still have those last three boxes to go through… And several other projects waiting in line…
When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible, are comely, as they take their place in the pictures of memory. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (Spiritual Laws)
Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house. ~ Elisabeth Tova Bailey (The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating)
