Yesterday I went for a Christmas morning walk. The “kids,” one about to leave his twenties and the other halfway through, could not make it home. COVID restrictions.  I met a couple pushing a stroller and stopped them briefly, learning it was their daughter’s second Christmas.  I talked longer to a neighbor whose two sons, three and five, remind me so much of my own boys at that age.

Those things combined to make me nostalgic. Perhaps empty nest syndrome comes in waves. The first wave when they go away to college. The next when they get jobs and more permanent living arrangements. Home both is and is no longer “home.”

So I set out my mother’s ceramic Santa and decorate the tree with paper ornaments the boys made at preschool.  I make a pot of tea and sit with my memories, both warm and bittersweet.

It was raining when I set out but I didn’t mind. I was heading home. I’ll dry off and make hot tea, I thought.

Turning to go home the long way around, I caught a whiff of the last few blooms of jasmine.

Drops of water tap my helmet and spatter my glasses. The damp of my dress, the chill of the breeze, and a kind of wild joy just exhilarating enough to occasionally take my breath.

I took my bike ride even later this evening than yesterday. The light had turned blue. The mourning doves had started their calls.

As I rode past a drain, I could hear the rushing of water.

I went for a walk this morning, the first in a very long time. The air was cool, the sky overcast. A neighbor’s bush had a halo of fire. Farther along, a tree with leaves of yellow had a vine, growing high in the canopy, dripping leaves of dull scarlet. Upon closer inspection, its trunk was scored with shoots climbing and encircling the bark-covered column.

Continuing my walk, I came across a house for sale. White with a gray skirt. And a door the color of butternut squash. Or of a rose leaf in autumn.

New Year’s Eve morning. Four days of freezing weather ahead. Today the weather is brisk but properly bundled up the air is bracing.

I pass a Christmas tree thrown into the ditch along my street. Stripped of almost all its finery, a plain tin ornament is still attached by a loop of rough twine. I snap it off and slip it into my pocket.

Early on this Sunday morning I am almost alone with the gray skies and Christmas decorations.  At the place where my path begins to turn back home, I see in a distance too far for hailing a man walking his dog.  Three quarters of the way home, I stop to watch as a leaf floats to the pavement at my feet. I look up at a tree made colorful by autumn foliage. Two women out walking together greet me.

Nearly home, I stop at the house with the abandoned Christmas tree. I carefully place the tin ornament on the porch, next to the wheels of the baby stroller.

As I pass my neighbor’s house, the red, green, and yellow of her Christmas lights, the same colors as my tree of falling leaves, bring warmth to a cold winter’s morning.