Switching it Up for October
Special! Guest article by Susie Kaufman
It’s Freaky Friday, and I’ve switched things up a bit. Meet my new buddy, Susie Kaufman, writing from Stockbridge, MA. She’s gracefully sent over “Fruit of the Forbidden Tree”, a guest post for us to share today.
Fruit of the Forbidden Tree
by Susie Kaufman
I observe myself being a wiseass. Some good people who are hosting an open mic I participate in have suggested The Fall as the prompt for October. Makes sense, right? The first thing I think of is In the Beginning, Adam and Eve naked and vulnerable, and that famous reptile, slithering up the trunk of the Tree. It takes me some minutes to adjust to the probability of ghosts and goblins, red maples and touch football. Clearly there’s something wrong with me. Why do I dive headlong into the mythos, when I could be drinking mulled cider and carving a jack o’lantern? The answer is apples. I’ve gotten my apple references crossed. We know, of course, that there were no Cortlands or Honeycrisps in the Holy Land when Chava was staining her fingers on pomegranate seeds from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Gan Eden. Still, we’ve always been told that her transgression somehow involved taking a bite out of an apple and nothing says fall like a Macoun. Here the back-to-school, à la mode tone of things really picks up steam and I realize The Fall is as American as, well, apple pie. It has a Hallmarky, Ladies Home Journal feel as if the generalized need to put a happy face on everything in this culture caused someone back a hundred years ago to put a good spin on the Fall from Grace and make it smell of cinnamon and cloves.
Where does it come from, this alternative to the perfectly good word autumn? It seems to suggest an awareness of the seasons that runs deep in the New England consciousness. Here in Stockbridge where Jonathan Edwards once scared the bejeezus out of the congregation ranting about eternal damnation, we understandably cling to the golden light of summer, the languid pace of baseball and melting ice cream cones, the abundance of the Garden until the frosts come and the inevitable, dark winter approaches. In this climate, Hell is not a place of sweltering. It is icy roads, cars that won’t start, backbreaking shoveling. We remember Hawthorne, he of The Scarlet Letter, sitting at his desk overlooking the Stockbridge Bowl up the road, pointing a long accusatory finger at Hester Prynne, and descending gleefully into human judgment, punishment, and guilt. This has a further chilling effect, so we put on our wool socks and begin our retreat into the short days and cold nights of the north. We settle indoors and hunker down deep inside our own awareness, dwelling on the ways we have fallen short and the memory of loved ones for whom an apple a day did not keep the doctor away.
But maybe this October, we can cut ourselves some slack and not judge ourselves too harshly. Instead of falling like a stone, let us, my friends, drift like a leaf, gracefully, slowly, from the highest branch of a towering oak to the soft earth with its remaining grass. It’s been a tough time and an apple, unburdened of its symbolic backpack, is nothing but a generous, goodhearted piece of fruit. Let’s liberate the apples from man’s first disobedience. Let’s convert them from dour Puritanism and put up some jars of applesauce for latkes at chanukah.
Susie Kaufman is a retired hospice chaplain. She has published the blog seventysomething since 2015, most recently HERE on Substack, featuring essays on memory, aging in amazement and the inner life. Kaufman’s 2019 essay collection “Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement” is available directly from her, from Amazon.
In exchange, Susie posted my guest article, Socially Mediated, on her Substack. Here’s a snippet. Head over to hers for the full post.
Socially Mediated
I’m writing this as the world shudders a little from the Facebook outage. I’m thinking about another level of involvement in our shared awareness. With social media giving a body to the shared unconscious, it gets kinda murky down there these days. But somehow we keep connecting, or at least I do, with friends and family and algorithms all cozied up together by the digital hearth of our personal screens. ….Read more at seventysomething….
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