This year I will do little which is my usual case. Hostas in flower beds get mulched for spring by the yellowing leaves of fall.

This year my roses, especially Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad” seem to be ignoring the season. Yesterday I scanned these two roses with an acer (maple) leaf I found outside the house of my Welsh neighbours the Galsworthys (I had to look the plural form).

It would seem that fall is a time when many of us reflect. I reflect. I wonder if I will live to see another fall.

In the many years Rosemary and I lived in Mexico City (8) and 9 without her we never experienced falling leaves as in Mexico the seasons are a dry one and a rainy one. Falling leaves in Vancouver give me nostalgia for Buenos Aires falls.

Fall is when I put all my long-sleeved flannel shirts in the wash. I often tell my friends that Julio Cortázar’s protagonist (readers say he was that) in Hopscotch (Rayuela) is having a cold winter in Paris so he buys a flannel lumberjack shirt that Cortázar calls – una canadiense. In Spanish nationalities are never capitalized.

Whenever I see a red rose in my garden I think of a line from my favourite Jorge Luís Borges poem La lluvia (in Spanish the first word in a title is capitalized then no more.

La lluvia – Jorge Luís Borges

Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado

Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.

Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa

Que sin duda sucede en el pasado.

Quien la oye caer ha recobrado

El tiempo en que la suerte venturosa

Le reveló una flor llamada rosa

Y el curioso color del colorado.

Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales

Alegrará en perdidos arrabales

Las negras uvas de una parra en cierto

Patio que ya no existe. La mojada

Tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,

De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.

The line - Le reveló una flor llamada rosas y el curioso color del colorad – Translates to  - A flower was revealed named a rose and the curious color that red is – does not have the lovely alliteration it has in Spanish.

The poem is an extremely sad one of going back to his childhood home and somehow hearing the voice of his dead father.

These fall days fill my memory and I see the faces of all my friends and family that are no longer with me. I grieve and only know that my oblivion will take care of that.

I find myself saying out loud – rosa – Rosamaría – Rosemary. As in Borges’ patio I, too can hear the voice of my loved one.