It's Never As Simple as All That

I shouldn't have been surprised.  After all, it is a well proclaimed phenomenon.  Perhaps I simply hadn't before seen it for myself.  Perhaps it still "feels"in my soul like the end of summer rather than the salad days of autumn and beyond.  Regardless of the explanation, it still stopped me when, turning the aisle in Target yesterday I was faced with the juxtaposition:  Halloween costumes on the right, lighted Christmas lawn ornaments straight ahead.    Goblins, spiders and spooks in bloody oranges and black, carousing retail with snowmen and Santa Clauses in all their twinkling glory.

I know, of course, that seasons aren't pure.  For a couple of weeks now we have alternated between killing frosts and sweat-filled afternoons.  Sunburn and frostbite side-by-side.  And the pattern will no doubt continue on into November.  Indian Summers that lull us into complacency, like last winter's early spring that seduced trees into premature budding, only to nip it all with a late freeze.  And in humans those epochal stages of maturation -- "childhood", "adolescence" and "adulthood" -- aren't closed and commenced with a calendar.  They gray from one to next -- dabblingly testing forward motions, then slipping backwards like the undulations of the sea.  Indeed, what adult has completely given up childhood, and what child doesn't every now and then flash a proleptic adulthood?  In my mind I am only recently out of high school, despite the evidence of my 56 years.  Internally I am still a youth, despite the external evidence of thickening waist and silvering hair.

Seasons don't change like the turning of a page.  Perhaps, then, Halloween and Christmas aren't really that far apart after all, but merely the contrasting expressions of fearfulness and grace.  Angels and ghosts, jack-o-lanterns and snowmen, scarecrows and wise men, a tombstone and a manger.  In fact, perhaps my earlier startlement, wheeling my cart around the aisle, is a good thing to experience -- a reorienting reminder that clarities are usually trumped by ambiguities.

I wonder if Target could be persuaded to leave some of both decorations up year-around?  As a reminder that life is more complicated than we might like to think.