29 Sep News from Experienced Goods October 2021

It’s one of those shoulder seasons. Autumn coolness at night, summer heat in the afternoon. Lush green leaves mingling with reds and golds. Both of my wardrobes (tee-shirts and shorts, long sleeves and jeans) in use. I’m not willing to winterize and store the outdoor grill yet, but have started cooking stews and baking bread. Is there still any decent fresh corn to be had? Will my zucchini plants EVER stop producing?

I find these between times of year to be wonderfully meditative and restorative. Letting go of one season and welcoming the next prompts me to take stock of where I have been and where I am going, pause in the rush to accomplish and simply appreciate the wonder of how things revolve and evolve. It’s no surprise that this is the time of year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for Halloween and shortly thereafter, Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of The Dead. These are festivals of reflection, assessment and atonement, a time when, across cultures, the veil between this world and the next is said to be at its thinnest and spirits of departed loved ones can visit the living. Of course, at Experienced Goods we are fully engaged in selling Halloween costumes and décor, but because the work we do directly benefits Brattleboro Area Hospice, we are always aware of how connected we are to the cycle of living and dying. Soon we will be putting up the Dia De Los Muertos altar, which presents an opportunity for all in the community to place mementos, notes, photos, an artwork on the altar in remembrance of those who have died.

Is there an afterlife? For me, an unanswerable question. It seems human to want loved ones we have lost to continue to exist somewhere just out of reach, and to hope we will see them again sometime. When I was eight years old my favorite cousin, Joel, who was 22 at the time, died when he crashed the small plane he was piloting. I was a child among four adult cousins, and he was the one who paid attention to me and engaged with me at family gatherings, and I loved him completely. At the age of eight, death made little sense to me, even though I knew he was gone and not coming back. I would look for his plane in the sky or wait for his car to come up the driveway.  Now he comes to me in the color of a summer sky or the sound of a small plane overhead.

The Dia De Los Muertos altar will be in the store on October 16 and will remain up until November 13. Please stop by for a moment, place an item on the altar if you’d like, honor the dead and reflect on this time of transition and transformation.

Joel

I still think of you
when I look at the abalone summer sky,
you skimming the spruce and Douglas fir in your Cessna,
me 8 years old bouncing in my Keds and waving wildly,
you tipping your sun-glinted wing in greeting,
a gentleman doffing his cap.
53 years ago; you would be 75 today.
I told my mother, “When I grow up I’m going to marry Joel”,
as if you would stay 22 until I could meet you there.
As it turned out, you did. You never got past the summer of 1968,
My mother running up from the garden to answer the phone,
my aunt telling her that you had died, the plane crashed,
only you, no passengers.
The color of the sky, the clouds, stir my belly
with expectation of the engine’s growl;
it was a morning like this, hot and blameless.
In my child’s mind I thought you had died in Vietnam,
all over the news at supper time.  I sang
Where Have All The Flowers Gone to mourn you.
Even so, for years I didn’t really believe it, watched and waited
for your blue Volkswagen bug to rattle up the driveway.
We would have stayed friends, would have called and written
and visited, cousins in a silent, partitioned family,
you would have listened to my songs, I would have babysat your children.
I do not believe in an afterlife,
however much I would like to see you again.
But today there was the unexpected jolt of the unchanged sky
where you had just been flying, and the ground
where I still stand, looking up.

~Jennie Reichman