I drove into Chicago very late Monday evening, almost midnight. As I came around Soldier Field, past the Field Museum and the planetarium, I saw the moon peering behind a splatter of clouds. It hung low, just a handful of hands away from the horizon, and shone a dense, muddled ochre. It felt like an early fall evening, not a late summer one. I woke up with a bit of a chill on Tuesday morning because that bold yellow moon had brought in autumnal weather; the temperature didn't reach above 70 that day.

It has been years since I felt this shift in the seasons. Late August the past three years we've been settling back into our drippy New Orleans apartment, shoring the place up for the coming hurricanes and swimming our way through the city's sweaty air. The heat this time of year there is intense. This past week nearly every day reached into the 100s, compounded by the humidity to make a heat index of at least ten degrees more than the actual temperature. Once I settle into the heat I don't mind it, and during those three years I didn't miss this time of year much. I was too busy finding my way through the South's most fascinating city.

S, on the other hand, missed fall every year. It was and is his favorite season. The first year we were together he took me apple picking in southern Michigan, then came home and baked one of the most delicious apple pies I've ever had. He has the touch when it comes to making crusts, like my grandmother had. He swears against rollers, and instead uses his warm hands to work the dough into the pie pan, molding the scalloped edge with his index fingers. Every one turns out flaky and golden, perfect. He would get giddy this time of year, full of anticipation for the few weeks we had of actual autumn when the trees turned color and the wind blew just cold enough. He made me love this season too.

Today summer came back. It's still over 20 degrees cooler than New Orleans, but it's not fallish anymore. But the change has begun. There's no stopping it now. Soon it will be time for picking apples and baking pies. And lucky me, my dear S will be here for the most early days of it. We found out today he will have his two weeks leave beginning September 15, which means he should get home around the 17th. We will spend our 6th anniversary together while he's here on September 25.

Here is our wedding picture. My mother made that stunning red dress. We were married at Starved Rock State Park, about 80 miles south of Chicago along the Illinois River. This particular place is Skeleton Overhang. There are trails into the oak and hickory forest leading up the rock formations and along a creek past a gentle waterfall. I had been coming to Skeleton Overhang for several years before I met S. I would drive down on a Sunday morning, walk through the woods, and take a few photographs of the river whispering behind swamp grasses, or the moss creeping up on the rocks rising from the creek bottom. It was like my own secret place. When I met S, I brought him and he loved it too. It didn't take much for us to decide to get married there.



Autumn is magical in the midwest. The summers are oppressive, which makes the crisp weather of early fall even more welcome. The day of our wedding it was perfectly warm -- not too hot to sweat, but not too cool to need a jacket. We had sun, too, which shone through the trees a golden yellow, a light premonition of the color the leaves would be turned to in a few short weeks.

Around the time of my step-father's illness and death, I began to travel around the midwest researching and photographing Native American earth and burial mounds. The mounds, some earthen wombs for the dead, nearly all planted near waterways, somehow helped me through the loss of my step-father, a man who had been a father to me for thirteen years before he died. I visited mounds in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, and was surprised more than once to find myself standing next to a mound at a run-down rest stop along a state highway. The history of our country is deep and ancient. The mounds up here are between 2,000 and 500 years old, but there are some that are even older in the south, including a number of significant sites in Louisiana. Some are where the dead were cradled in earth, their bones coated in red iron oxide; others are animal totems, where fires were burned at the heart of the creature before stones and earth were shaped around the ashes; others still were foundations for structures, pyramidic mounds that were once topped with houses of worship, perhaps, or houses of power.

One of my favorite sites was Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa along the Mississippi River. S and I went there several years in a row, in the early fall and in the dead of winter to celebrate my birthday which is on one of the year's darkest days in early February. We stayed at a small B+B that, not surprisingly, always had space that time of year. Each year we were the only visitors. One year we had complementary black eyes from karate class: his on the left, mine on the right. The owner of the place was a bit taken aback when she opened the door to us, as you'd expect, and seemed downright nervous about having us in her house. We laughed about that one.

Snaking through the woods on a cliff above the Mississippi are a train of bear-shaped mounds, each one about 20 feet long. There are more than a dozen of them, and each has evidence of a fire burned at the heart of the animal before the earth was hand-packed over the remnants. They are affectionately called the "marching bears," as they are all facing the same direction and seem to be headed somewhere, perhaps to join their brothers in the sky. There is a connection between the cosmology of our ancestors and the mounds, something that S decided to study in school after spending time with these bears. He was a chemical engineer when we met; now he is an archaeologist studying the ethnohistoric significance of a astronomically-based ceremony and the temples connected to it in a small village outside Oaxaca City in central Mexico.

At some sites the connection between the cosmos and the mounds is obvious -- at the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, for instance, the bends of the snake (or comet, or something else we can't imagine) point to seasonal solstices and moon rises. The marching bear mounds do not have such an obvious connection, but during the winter months when Orion the hunter and his dog Sirius rise above the bears, the marriage of earth and sky feels clear and true.

Here are the bears on their walk through the woods:


This mound in the shape of a person, called "Man Mound", is in the backyard of a dusty white farm house. To the left of the mound is a tire swing and beyond the fence of trees are fields of corn. The mound's legs were truncated at the knees when the state route was paved years ago. The man is a horned man. His arms hang straight down his sides:


I took this picture at the end of autumn one year. Beyond this mound in Aztlan State Park in Wisconsin, S and Casey played in the field, circling around the conical mounds that sit as a string of pearls along one end of the park. Beyond the bare trees is a tributary of Rock River, which is itself a tributary of the Mississippi:


My master's thesis was a chapbook of photographs, poems, and essays about the mounds titled "Sky-Map: An Earthwork Diary". I was able to publish 100 color copies when I was awarded a grant by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, most of which are still sitting in a cardboard box at the bottom of our downstairs closet four years later. I don't know if I will visit the mounds again this year, or if S and I will drive the five hours to Effigy Mounds while he's here. Everything is up in the air, nothing is certain. And though I wish it was, I have to accept that this is the way all life is, constantly changing, shifting from this season to the next, where birth and life and death weave together and make this beautiful, heartbreaking world we find ourselves in.

We're actors living in the theater of the absurd. It's hard to believe sometimes that things have become so, well, absurd, but they have. I almost said surreal, but that's not the right word. Surreal implies something rather whimsical, and there is nothing whimsical about what's going on these days.

I've been anxious and a little depressed since coming home to Chicago on Monday. It's always hard coming back here, to open the door and find no S, no Casey. To cheer myself up I've been listening to two of my favorite records by Olu Dara, In the World: From Natchez to New York and Neighborhoods. Okra. What a song. And Your Lips. I See the Light. I can hardly stand it, the joy is so great. What a difference some good music can make in a day...

So Pat Robertson has finally apologized for advocating the assassination of the president of Venezuela after first saying that his words were "misinterpreted" and taken out of context, a rather pathetic attempt to cover his ass given that he called for the assassination and used the word "assassinate" in his call. He's a complete and utter schmuck and republicans across the states should be ashamed of him. Whatever. In some ways I think of him as a nutcase bully who ought to be simply ignored, but that doesn't work given how powerful he is within the ruling party. Talk about absurd.

And then there was this from the AP, the propagandizing on the gravestones of soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan by our government, who seem incapable of stopping themselves from exploiting every situation for their own political gain. For the first time, Arlington and other government cemeteries are putting the names of the operations on the gravestones, rather than simply the name of the war in which the soldier died. It is Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom now. The government claims that they give the choice to families, but apparently not to all:


On the surface this is not such an afront, but realizing how the names of our operations are now politicized and specifically chosen to influence the public about the wars, it is an afront. No surprise at all, the practice of naming operations with propaganda-friendly names began in the 1980s with our invasion of Panama, carefully named "Operation Just Cause."

Maureen Dowd takes Bush to task today and as usual points out the numerous absurdities that make up our commander-in-chief:


And finally a Democrat takes the party to task for their invisibility, their complete and utter inaction in the face of our government's absurdities. Gary Hart says the awful truth, that the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot with their lack of strategy and their silence. I compare them to wanna-be rope-a-dope fighters. They don't seem to understand that the rope-a-dope strategy only works if you have a guaranteed knock-out punch. Sure, feign being tired, lost in the fight. If you can knock the guy out in the tenth round then go for it; otherwise you lose on points. Considering that we've lost the last two elections on points, I'd say this is an absurd strategy.

It just never ends.

I was disturbed today to read that two Iraq veterans have been charged with murder and attempted murder. They both came home with PTSD and both sought out counseling (and one received it, though not the extent he needed it, clearly). It is too much to ask people to kill for us. It's particularly absurd to ask people to kill for us and then expect them to come home and integrate back into society as if they'd never gone to war in the first place. It's irresponsible of our government to continue to ignore the needs of our veterans, to continue to underfund PTSD counseling and support, and to abandon our soldiers as soon as they're home from war. The VA estimates that 30% of soldiers are coming home with PTSD. This is the government's own statistic. Imagine what it must really be. And Operation Truth has had to shame the president and his party to fully fund the VA this year, and still they have failed to meet the needs of returning veterans, many who are suffering from horrible wounds to their bodies or their spirits or both:


It's as if the absurdity never ends. Our "war president" wages war thoughtlessly with a strategy for endless conflict and doesn't even bother to support the troops in meaningful ways. Meanwhile his followers, many who support him unquestioningly as if he were a prophet or medieval king, smear grieving mothers of dead soldiers, run their trucks over war memorials, and, most absurd of all, refuse to sign up with the volunteer army to fight a volunteer war they "support."

Sometimes I have to just turn it off for a few minutes, put Olu Dara on the stereo, and sing along to "I See the Light." Glory be.

Fellow Salon blogger, Dave Pollard, has a wonderful eulogy to his dog Chelsea who died a few days ago. He talks about Chelsea's death, but also about the love and joy she brought to him and his family. It made me think about Casey, our lovely dog who passed away a couple of months ago. This is a picture I took of him within weeks of his death. He was a soft and cuddly pooch who gave us a bit of trouble when we first adopted him over five years ago from the Anti-Cruelty Society. When we adopted him he was already getting up there in age -- about seven or so -- and had a nervous temperament. He clearly had been traumatized by the separation from his first family, so he was very needy all the time and panicked a bit when we left him alone. He'd often poop on the floor downstairs (on the paper) out of nervousness. He was clearly trained, he just couldn't bear being left alone. Over time, he became comfortable with us and confident that we wouldn't abandon him and his pooping inside stopped.

Dogs are pets, not people. I know that. We didn't treat Casey as we would a child (you can't exactly check a kid into the kennel for the weekend!), but we loved him. He was a part of our family. I miss him. And I'm sorry S wasn't here with me when I had him put down. Casey liked to be hugged. I know S would have liked to squeeze the little guy one more time before saying goodbye.


The week immediately after S left for Afghanistan, I holed myself up in our house, watched every single episode of Sex and the City for three consecutive days and nights, and surfed the internet for anything at all about Afghanistan. I even searched eBay. I bought an utterly ridiculous "U.S. Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan" action figure which I've left hidden in the closet since, too ashamed to even look at it now, and I found a pink tourmaline up for auction, a 2+ carat stone unearthed from the rocky mountains of Afghanistan after the Taliban was ousted by our invasion (but, unfortunately, before they were totally defeated, as they are still active across the country). I bid on the stone and won it for $26, including shipping. When I received it, I was surprised by how pleasing the color was. It was not a brilliant cubic zicronia pink; it was subtle, delicate.

I bought the stone because I wanted something from the place where S was, something I could keep close to me, to somehow feel connected to him, however tenuously. We had spent the last three years together in New Orleans where we both had flexible school schedules, he as a graduate student, me as a freshman comp instructor, which meant that we were home during the day most days and able to spend substantial amounts of time together. In the afternoons we ran in Audubon Park; every other day or so we worked out at the Tulane gym, lifting weights, holding focus mitts for each other, suffering through our sit-up and push-up routine; a couple of times each week we went grocery shopping, buying fresh organics at Whole Foods (which was like a little slice of the United States right there in the middle of New Orleans -- clean, new, organized, bustling with people); and we cooked meals together, sometimes more than one a day, to save money and because we liked to work together in our drippy, rustic kitchen. And every day, without fail, we sat side by side on the bed, little Casey at our feet, and wrote on our matching laptops, each of us asking the other to look over a paragraph or two or read through a poem.

When S was sent to Ft. Hood just after Christmas, I felt his absence acutely, and it became worse after he was sent to Afghanistan in mid-February. I was lonely without him, for sure, but not in the usual way. I went from having an all-the-time companion to having none, not in the day, not in the night. None. The ache I felt by his absence was deep inside, settled down behind by belly button, and it rose with every thought I had of the danger he was in, caught me in my heart and left me with that twinge of pain brought on by anxiety that I used to feel before karate matches, or before a particularly grueling test. My heart literally ached for him.

When I got the stone, I took it to the jeweler where we'd purchased our wedding rings, a custom place in the first suburb north of the city, Evanston, about three or four miles from our house. I told the owner, the same man we'd bought our wedding rings from, that I didn't want to spend more than $300 on the ring and he said okay. We came up with a design together, something reminiscent of ancient jewelry in its simplicity but also truly contemporary in its mix of brushed and polished metal. He told me I'd have the ring in less than a month.

I picked up the ring with my dear friend Lisa who had driven from New Orleans to Chicago with me even though she was in the early months of her pregnancy and racked with "morning sickness" all day long. The ring was beautiful and heavy in weight. And so was the price. Instead of $300 it was $600. I was put off, of course, but had no choice really but to buy the ring since it was custom made and since the jeweler had told me that the $300 was an "estimate" and there was a good chance it would cost more. There I was with my $26 stone wrapped up in a $600 ring and instead of feeling good about it, feeling connected to S by it, I was irritated and upset that I had let my loneliness lead me to spend so much on something so frivolous. Lisa insisted the ring was worth it and encouraged me to wear it. I couldn't for several days. I was too angry at myself. But now I wear it next to S's wedding ring, which he left for me to wear after hearing stories of rings stolen off the hands of wounded and killed soldiers, or simply lost in the desolate mountains ringing Afghanistan's center.


Here is S obscured behind a curtain of discarded mardi gras beads inside the "Love Bus" outside Jacques-Imo's restaurant on Oak Street. There is always a wait at Jack's place. If you're lucky, though, you can steal away in the love bus alone, hold hands, and talk about the gumbo bowl and fried chicken you'll be feasting on soon enough. I've not been back to Jacques-Imo's since S left. I want to save that place for us together. Perhaps we'll go there next spring after he's come home safe and we have a weekend or so to go back down to New Orleans, run in the park, and sit next to each other on the bed, typing away.