From The Innkeepers

On Letting Go and Giving Thanks

For as far back as I can remember, fall has been my favorite season. For me, no other season can compare. It’s the excitement of the start of a new school year, cozy sweaters, gorgeous foliage, and pumpkin spice everything. This year, having retired from teaching and moved to the Inn, I had the privilege of immersing myself in the beauty of autumn like never before. Because I used to spend most of September within the four walls of a classroom, I had somehow never realized that weather-wise, September is the sunniest, most pleasant month of the year. And of course, October, with its big blue skies and vivid colors, is the crown jewel of fall. Now here we are in November.

Let’s be honest. November is no October. By November, the honeymoon is over. Halloween has passed, frosty mornings have taken the last of the flowers, cold winds have moved in, and the scantily clad trees stand as a reminder that winter is coming.

On a recent walk, I stopped to lament the loss of leaves on one of the most brilliant trees at the edge of the meadow. This mighty oak was glowing with flaming oranges and reds just a week or two ago, and now its branches are mostly bare. A snippet of a long-buried poem surfaced in my mind.

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

I understood immediately why those lines returned. Like Margaret, I was grieving an unleaving. I marveled a little that this question had been lying dormant since high school English class, no doubt alongside a collection of Bon Jovi lyrics and the muscle memory of how to penny-roll a pair of jeans. I looked around at my own golden grove for a moment, taking in the fleeting beauty that remained before walking on.

The loss of fall leaves is always a little bit heartbreaking. There is a powerlessness in knowing there’s no stopping the dropping. The beautiful show must come to an end. But there is also a comfort in knowing the trees won’t let us down in the spring. We can count on the fact that new leaves will emerge and provide us shade, lush greenery, and ultimately a new color show next fall.

As I think about the season’s inevitable endings, I can’t help but see a parallel to life here at the Inn. Aaron and I arrived in late August, right on the edge of the busy season. After a few weeks to get unpacked and settled in, we welcomed four wonderful groups in five weeks and got a swift education in what it is like to run this place. Before we got here, I assumed the hardest parts of running the Inn would be the logistics: the laundry, the maintenance, the never-ending to-do lists. And while each of those things has brought its challenges, what has surprised me the most is the twinge of sadness I feel when the last car rolls out of the driveway at the end of each retreat.

I’ve realized there is a unique kind of tenderness involved with hosting. We open our home to our guests, and for a few days our lives overlap. We hear stories about their families, learn the history of their friendships, and share our wonder at the beauty of the nature around us. Most of our guests this fall were people I met for the first time and greeted with a handshake but said goodbye to with a hug. After they depart, the house is quiet, and it takes a day or two to adjust to not having these good people around.

Saying goodbye to this first season as Innkeepers feels a little like watching the trees let go of their leaves. For Aaron and me, as much as it has been an exciting transition, it has also been a season of letting go. We recently closed on the sale of our house in Ann Arbor, we are adjusting to a completely new pace of life, and most of all, we miss our daughter, who is now living on her own for the first time to attend college two hours away. Even though these are ultimately changes to be thankful for, the letting go still leaves an ache. Yet how lucky we are to have so many things we love so deeply that we notice how hard it is to let them go. It is much like Margaret’s grieving of the “unleaving”.

Curious about where those lines came from, I looked them up. It turns out they are from a poem called “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was written to a young child who was saddened by the loss of the leaves in the fall. The narrator suggests that soon enough, she will grow up to experience deeper sorrows, and that what she is truly mourning is her own mortality. The poem ends with these two lines:

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret that you mourn for.

When we must let go of parts of our lives that we have come to love, large or small, it’s impossible not to feel the ache of the absence of what we have lost and the fear of what we will ultimately lose in the future. Yet we must have the courage to feel the full range of emotions that come with being human. The difficult truth is that if we never had people and experiences that were hard to let go, our lives wouldn’t be nearly as rich. They wouldn’t be nearly as worth living.

Midway through this month, Ryan, Aaron, and I will host our final retreat group of the year, and then we will take a much-needed pause until January. The people who have come through our doors this first fall have given us a beautiful introduction to the life that lies ahead for us as a new team. We take comfort in knowing that when the new year comes, just like the leaves on the trees, most of these guests will return and new guests will arrive. In this season of change, we are grateful for all of it.

With appreciation,
Erin, Aaron, and Ryan
Keepers of the Rustic Gate