November and the month where nature is laid bare. The trees cast off garments of dry leaves and the earth’s bones are showing.

My chickens are into their hard molts, meaning that their feathers are coming off in huge tufts. Clumps of fluffy undergrowth blow up against the back door. Beneath their night-time perch lies thick piles of long pinfeathers in dusty, dejected piles.

Asleep in the darkness, they must fall from their shoulders and waft gently to the ground like snow.

All except for Juliette, who managed to change her wardrobe out last month – she alone is plump and shiny and ready to rumble. And she does – she’s the queen now. She moves among the flock with a regal air. Beauty is power and chickens know it.

To see a chicken molting at first you think it is in a final stage of death.

There is a ragged, beaten-up look to them – chickens lose at least half of their plumage, and what remains hangs by bits from their meat, looking ashy and grey.

Their listless combs are pale pink and they droop to one side with scant blood supply to pump them up.

They are pitiful, unable to assert themselves, off their game.

Vulnerability is death, of course.

And it is most startling to observe their faces (if they let you), especially around the eyes. The plucked white skin around them makes them appear elderly.

You swear they are not long for this life.

Reading about this situation, I learn that the feathers are actually bones, and that it is mighty painful when they are shed. And even more so when they are regrowing, which takes very little time considering.

I used to dread the molt – the few times a year when the girls look so unhealthy, and when they get picked on and the pink, tender skin gets brutally exposed down to their undercarriage.

Each chicken, on its own miserable cycle, would skulk around the edges of the feeder, hide in bushes, make do with the dregs – the picked over grains, the freshest sips of water.

But as with old age, you take a breath and look closer.

What first looks like frailty is just the glimpse of the architecture. A rare look at the pins that gird the bird. It’s the sturdy wire that makes the whole thing hold together. Even fly.

And so I look at November this way – with the stripping down of the birch bark, and the plucking and blowing of cones and spores. As a glimpse of the grit, the nut, the essence.

Nature always makes way for new growth – ready or not – but only with a ripping away of the summer’s wet green.

This only hurts like the old torn-off band-aid, I have to see it like that.

Death is here, always, in the seasons.

In our family, in my body.

When my dad dies, the pain will cross the seasons, the sting will never go away.

But when I talk to him every week on Face Time I can telescope his eyes.

And there is the same kind of tenaciousness I see in my hens. But with a humor and mental cleverness and a twinkle that is all Dad.

And I witness a brutal honesty that is strong, even supple, which, of course, has always been there to see.

But now it’s almost an expression that says, here we are, old body, it’s just a season like the others.

His clear blue eyes are remarkably the same, it’s just the feathering that is changing.

But whatever I observe, I know that it is best to take the time to look. To note the eyes, both my father’s and my flock’s.

So today in my yard, I assess the dry, flaking (repellent) poultry faces.

Catching them when they are low is a rare window. The hens are easier to grab, and to hold, and so I pretend that they need me more.

I stroke their breastbones full of the pebbly grain, and they startle and tremble, but remain composed in my warm clutches.

Believe it or not, I see them as proud creatures. And I treat them that way.

I think I am the one that sees sadness where there is actually hope.

Almost before I wake, there are tears in the corners of my eyes. It’s like the emotions from dreams, or even empty sleep, are squeezing my body’s container and must find the release valve. Like my air mattress here in the NYC guest room.

Deflate me, God. It’s a lot.

I’ve sometimes wondered how any person can go though a regular day without hot tears behind the lids ready to spill. For me, it’s always an easy access route – my cheeks are near perpetual puffery.

I just want to live the day to the full.

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There are two times in a woman’s life where she must go it alone – rely completely on herself, her own body, with singular pain and endurance, to achieve the goal. Both journeys are mental, physical, and emotional – and are basically solo.

Two marathons.

Birth and death, you can shuffle them up and place them on the table in any configuration.

My daughter is in the final stretch of hers – in the 38th week of pregnancy. If she asks about specifics, I want to be articulate when I attempt to describe the experience of giving birth, but I can’t. I don’t remember that much.

And it doesn’t matter anyway – it was a solitary pain, custom-fit to my own body. But what we will share is the birth narrative, and her experience will be the notes of her own book.

An account about a rugged trail that is never short (not really), is never a breeze and is almost always a gruel.

But then there is the finish line, thank God.

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Last weekend I went up to NYC to watch my son run the NYC Marathon.

It was a vivid swirl of colorful bodies – wheelchairs, workers, police motorcycles – so many blew past me that I couldn’t identify the faces. 50,000 runners flew, ran, jogged, walked, stumbled and collapsed along the 5 boroughs of that city.

And even though it was a crazy mass of humanity – packed tight, jostling and elbowing – each runner was still alone. Even though they were cheered on by the deafening multitudes of family, coaches and strangers, each one had only an individual body to see them through to the finish line.

For me the marathon is the clearest metaphor I can find today for life – from birth to death – the practice, the struggl, the pain, the transcending of all of the body’s physical, mental, and emotional limits.

That’s why we’re drawn to it. We watch even if we’ve never run around the block.

It is a display of bare-faced human grit and steel will to keep going, to keep living.

When things are so hard, when days make no sense. When negativity fights to block our airways. When we feel no strength in the legs, when we can’t see any road markers or even get a sense of what we’re running towards.

When we doubt we’ll ever want to run a race again. Or run at all.

And always there is the question, squinting toward the blurry finish – why?

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Last night, back home in my own bed, I wake to the weird conclusion that I am all alone.

And that both of my kids are alone too, even as they live their full, active lives with partners.

But in the best way, we each sit in the stands and we cheer for this growing, changing family to keep on going.

I take deep breaths in the quiet kitchen, I cry into the bath towel.

No words, just a fullness in my chest that I honestly believe can rise and coalesce and take flight – and travel like a runners legs sprinting across a dirty city street, or like the tremor of a muscle contraction that builds and lengthens and brings a child.

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My enormous emotions swing and catch and blow across the autumn yard, into the sky.

I see the Cooper’s hawk circling above the near naked oak tree.

And I think about the backyard honeybees.

They are packed in the hive, one atop another, and their tiny lace wings rise and fall in a quiet cadence as they brush against one another.

All winter, they will converse and socialize, and develop, even in that tiny home.

And they wait.

And come spring, the delicate new wings will power them for miles and miles to do what they must.

The raptor and the insect, so different, but alike in a way, too.

Each will traverse on the jet stream of nature’s migration, alone, but also part of a huge dance, one that’s too complex and mysterious for me to fathom – but one that sweeps me up nonetheless.

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