What the Roots Knew: A Poem on Turning 60 & New Beginnings

I’ve always loved autumn, perhaps because it reminds us that letting go and beginning again can happen at the same time. On my sixtieth birthday, that feels especially true.

For this milestone, I found myself wondering what the woman I might be at eighty would say if she could reach back across twenty autumns and speak to me now.

This is what I imagined she might say.

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I remember this morning.

September light entering slowly…
pale gold across the windows, mist thinning beyond the glass, maples beginning their turn from green toward flame.

You’ve always loved this season with its cool mornings, gathering shadows, and the strange beauty of things,
releasing what they can no longer keep.

Perhaps that’s why sixty suited September.

Still, beneath your love of autumn lived a question you had not quite spoken:
how much of life is behind me now,
and, how much is still waiting?

You thought you were asking about time.
You were really asking whether there was enough of it to begin again.

Twenty Septembers from this morning, I remember that uncertainty.
I remember something else more clearly… the restlessness.
Another life seemed to move beneath the one you knew, not asking you to become someone new, only asking for room.

You had spent years becoming what life required: carrying work, family, worry, expectation, gathering responsibilities so gradually you no longer felt their weight until you began setting some of them down.
Not all. Life was never that tidy.
But just enough.

Enough to hear yourself again.
Enough to discover silence was not emptiness.
Enough to stop asking whether it was too late for whatever still called your name.
You could not know then what waited beyond that morning.

Loss came too.
Of course it did.
Twenty years can’t pass without taking something with them.
But loss changed you less by what it removed than by what it made impossible to carry any longer.

You softened where softness mattered.
Elsewhere, you learned the grace of an untroubled no.
You stopped apologizing for changing your mind.
Stopped mistaking being needed for being known.
And, slowly, you stopped confusing youth with possibility.

At eighty, this is what I would place into your hands if I could:
Look at the trees. Not only at what the golden leaves they release. Look lower.
September is busy beneath the surface.
Seeds settle into dark earth.
Roots travel where no eye follows.
Sap turns inward.
A whole forest appears to surrender while life gathers itself out of sight.

You can’t see your own roots moving either.
You imagine change will announce itself like a door opening, a great decision, some unmistakable hour when one life becomes another. It seldom does.
More often, it begins beneath you. A loosening. A clearing.
One quiet refusal to carry what no longer belongs.
Then one day you turn and discover distance behind you.

So this morning, as sixty opens its eyes with you, don’t count what has fallen.
Go outside. Breathe September in…
woodsmoke somewhere beyond the houses,
cold sweetness gathering in the air,
leaves beginning their brief astonishment of gold.

Let what is finished be finished.
There is no betrayal in that.

And whatever waits within you, unnamed, unhurried, still hidden beneath the season, leave room for it.
You don’t need to know what it will become.

Because I do.

I have lived twenty autumns beyond this morning.
I’m eighty now, and I am the woman who grew from it.

May we never confuse age with the end of possibility.