It's Autumn

I can explain those flowers--and I will, repeatedly

For the last two weeks, every time I turned on my car the same message greeted me: Oil change is required.

On the first day this felt like a kindly reminder. By Day Ten it was a sigh of disappointment: We tried to warn you.

“Oh, you don’t want to ignore that,” my friend Sue said, in that campfire, ghost story-voice she uses when she’s trying to get my attention. It worked.

So, here I am, sitting in the waiting room of the place that regularly performs miracles on my car. I used to go to one of those drive-through places for my oil changes, where you pull your car over a well and wait as someone works below. This always reminded me of a gynecology exam. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew something was going on down there. It felt undignified.

A few years ago, I dropped my car off for a tire change and Eric, the manager, suggested I should start bringing my car to them for oil changes, too.

“It’s time,” he said.

I have no idea why he put it that way, but his demeanor was so somber that I immediately agreed. So, now I hand over my keys and sit in an overheated waiting room full of mostly women who greet me with sympathetic smiles. Soon enough, we start making small talk with one another because we are used to people thinking women have all the time in the world. Totally different from the doctor’s office.

We all have our stories. This morning one woman, who was wearing a Nope Not Today t-shirt, felt something go wrong with her car as she was driving and realized that yep, today was exactly the day. She was worried about being late to work. A woman sitting two feet from her wore a Cleveland Guardians shirt and a smile of the happily retired as she worked on a book of word puzzles. “I’m glad I’m not you,” she said. That was helpful, I thought but didn’t say, and you know I wanted to.

Another woman walked in with a bag of knitting and a cane. She had recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, she explained, but she can still ride her horse on their farm so she’s counting her blessings. When it was finally my turn to leave the waiting room, she apologized for staring at my shoes, but would I mind telling her the brand?

I wrote down the name and model on the back of the song insert from yesterday’s church service program. Like most hymns, it was written for sopranos and why is that? Every time, the congregation rises to sing and my face flares with yet another infusion of alto envy. Sometimes our pastor reads my essays here on Substack, and I’m hoping this is one of those times. Maybe he’ll understand why I look like I’m screaming for help when I’m singing.

The oil change waiting room had two walls with windows, which offered a reassuring view of autumn revving her engines. This is my favorite time of year, and not coincidentally, it was my mother’s, too. Every year, on the first day of fall, I share this photo of her from 1981.

I don’t know how she kept a straight face long enough for me to snap this picture. Mom was always a performer at heart who never felt entitled to attention. I wish I could tell her how many readers say their fall doesn’t start until they see this picture of her. I’d especially enjoy telling her in front of Dad.

He was with us that day, and he was his usual grumpy self as we clowned around. Dad had a sense of humor, but he seldom laughed until after he had grandchildren. He refused to explain why, except to say, “Maybe it’s because you kids were never funny.” He was kidding, possibly.

As I prepared to capture Mom’s Leaf Fascinator Pose, which is what we now call it, Dad felt the need to remind us that we were in a public place and people were staring. This made us laugh harder.

Here’s another photo of my mother from that day. It sat in a frame on Dad’s bedroom bureau until he died. He outlived my mother by almost seven years, and for all those years he refused to move a thing on the top of her dresser or his bureau. His attempt, perhaps, to freeze that moment in time when his Janey was still alive. He ordered me never to clean anything in that room. After he died, the dust on his bureau was a carpet I could pull off in chunks. The only thing dust-free was that photo of Mom.

A confession about that flower box full of autumn blooms in the picture at the top of this essay: It sits on the railing of our front porch, and every petal is as fake as the highlights in my hair.  

I have never done this before. I have my reasons. Every September, I fill pots bursting with mums, and they die before the first frost. We’re talking weeks before the first frost. Sometimes months. Every summer, I turn our back deck into a garden of two-dozen pots of flowers that attract butterflies, hummingbirds and honeybees. In autumn, my three pots of mums attract death.  

So, this is what’s it comes to. I told no one that I had ordered these fake flowers, not even my husband, but now that they’re planted, I can’t stop telling people they’re fake. Every time a neighbor walks by and compliments my fall flowers, I confess.

“What kind of flowers are those?”

“Fake.”

How do you keep those flowers so full?

“They’re fake.”

“I love your flowers,” a woman yelled through her open window as she drove by.

“Thank you,” I yelled back, “they’re fake!”

My Mom would be mortified. “Never make a person feel stupid for saying something nice to you,” she always said. “Say thank you and enjoy the compliment.”

This advice started back in her beehive days, when Mom used to let her hairdresser add seasonal decorations to her hair. That beehive was a thing of wonder. She was 4’11” and she thought a towering beehive made her look taller. I thought it made her look like she was balancing a burial mound on her head, but the time never seemed right to share that observation. Also, I wanted to live.

Mom’s favorite beehive decoration was a fake bird’s nest to celebrate Easter in 1967. It held three blue robin’s eggs, which were also fake, thank the Lord. When my three siblings and I first saw it, we stared at it with dropped jaws, like a row of gutted codfish.

That Easter was quite the moment for Mom after we walked into church. We trailed behind our mother and basked in the hum of her string of thank-yous as she patted her beehive and made her way through the sanctuary, center aisle.