Looking to escape the inevitable...

Weekends in mid-autumn are filled with the routine tasks of preparing for what lies ahead: winter.

Hubby mows to chop up the fallen leaves, because raking would be ridiculous. While he does that, I walk the vineyard rows and attempt to repair any limbs torn from the trellis by recent winds. The leaves are curled and bronzed. a result (I hope) of the changing seasons and not a consequence of some unidentified or left-untreated disease. (The grape experts said year one should be disease free.) But that's really all that's to be done in the vineyard now. The bulk of our pruning and preparing for season two will occur in February.

Later, hubby and I load up the bench, the chairs and tables, the swing and the hammock, and stack the furnishings of summer in the granary; we drape the pieces in plastic to protect them from the birds that nest in the building. It seems not all that long ago when I pulled all those things out of storage and set them in place in the yard. It was early, before planting. Oh, how the days of our life pass us by!

A sense of sadness pervades this activity. Although we've had a temperate autumn so far, experience tells us winter can invade without much notice, and the old man has been known to linger like a bad cough. None of us can predict the future, though. Autumn may stretch itself all the way into December. On the other hand, the landscape could turn starkly white by week's end.

It's the latter scenario that leaves me longing for an escape, a right turn onto the road that heads south to points unknown. I sense that I may finally embark on that trip,which I've longed to take most of my life, the adventure that doesn't come with an itinerary, the journey of discovery that can't possibly be mapped out in advance. Perhaps this is a quest to answer the question most of us need to pose to ourselves at least once in a lifetime: why am I here?