Autumn Beans

In the first days of true fall, the sun so welcome and warm I wonder when the cursed heat of summer took its leave, I learn from beans.

First, I sit and shell dry beans for seed saving. Hulling the dormant life from dead, dried pods, we work together, the two of us sitting and scooping beans with our thumbs and I listen to the update of her life. The end of one relationship, the beginning of another.
She tells me about her ideas of "ethical love" and how after a painful exchange with her ex, she goes to her mother's house and draws a tarot card. Just one, and it's death. "What does that mean?" I ask. "That something has to end," she says.

Later in the afternoon, I am harvesting the last of the green beans with two people I have just met. We get to know one another, a steady stream of pleasant conversation as we more bed to bed, bent or kneeling. The garden is yellow and dry or green and wilted and the air smells like earth.
I ask the boy if he will stay here a long time, after his job is done. He is silent for a moment, then cautiously tells me of his father's death this past summer, the suddenness of the cancer's spread, and how his mother is alone now, across the country. I feel heavy and then ashamed that I have nothing more graceful to say than, "I'm sorry;" to ask a few questions and to say the desert is a land made for healing.

I die too, sometimes daily, or now, hard and deep for a week. Everything seems to be suffering and the shape of a window is painful, my frail existence inexplicably unbearable.

It doesn't occur to me until now, on the back porch with the October earth tilting from the sun, that this is the season of death, of pain. This is the way things move. Beans that are dry and scatter across the floor when dropped from my hands or the last green beans pulled from the garden, the loss of love or a loved one is all laid bare in the autumn. We must die and till and replant with last season's seeds to have new bounty. It doesn't hurt me for a moment to smile at the desert's cliffs and breathe the crisp air.