I have been on the road for a long weekend trip visiting family in New Jersey. Driving to Charlotte Wednesday morning, the sun coming up over the ridge, I was struck by the late October foliage, brilliant: every autumnal shade cast aglow in dewy, golden light–burnt orange and red, deep burgundy, bright yellow to brass.

The fall colors were arriving at their sensational peak after weeks and weeks of waiting through a long, hot summer that stretched its airs well into late September. Part of me hated to leave, to miss seeing the handful of days that the forest covering these ancient mountains puts on such a show. There was rain in the forecast for the weekend, and it never takes much to bring it all to a delicate end.

But I don’t get many windows to take off for long weekend trips like these. Time is precious, and schedules are busy. All the more important to understand the gift it is to come back here, to see loved ones while there’s still time to visit.

I don’t mean to cast such a sober light on it all. I’ve written before about how poignant these trips back to my home state have become, particularly with age, especially as relatives dear to me grow older. The bite of nostalgia comes right after I merge onto the Garden State Parkway. I indulge it.

Let me, then, be sure to celebrate the joy: the good visits with my Aunt Shirley and my Uncle Bill, both widowed, both in their 80s, and both getting along as well as they can, both a joy to sit with and laugh and share meals with. Both a delight to hear tell stories.

How good it felt to see my Uncle Joe, who I’ve missed too many times on these New Jersey trips, whose ebullience is infectious. What a warm feeling to spend time with my cousins: Shannon and Jason (and Debbie and Jenna) and Tracey (and Lucy!) and Ashley and Brianna.

Across four short days: Newark to Colts Neck to Neptune to Bradley Beach to Lebanon to Annandale to New Brunswick to Piscataway and all the way back to Newark. Love, out-of-town-family-love, underwrote every mile. It is a marvelous thing, that kind of love–a passport of sorts, something that affords you the privilege of imposing, even if for a few hours or a day or two, but nonetheless gracing us with an easy passage from absence to reunion.

Today is All Saints Day, the holy day each November where we remember the saints who have come before us. And, to recall our dear friend Brad’s homily, that we, too, are all saints.

Brad, who was the rector at our Episcopal church in Statesville, reminded us on those days when we would principally remember the dead that we are full of life and obligation and love and mission, that there is work to do.

At Trinity, they celebrated the day by covering the altar with a beautiful cloth sewn to look like the branches of a tree. And upon each branch, beautiful fall leaves, each inscribed with the name of someone dearly departed. I remember looking up from the altar rail at communion, reading them as I could, holding their memories in my mind.

“Salvation belongs to our God,” reads the lectionary passage for today’s All Saints Sunday. The sentiment is found first in the Psalms, but here it is from Revelation, where the author sees a great multitude from every nation and tribe worshipping with palm branches. The host of saints, the delicate leaves on the altar cloth, the love that binds us all.

Every year, and every season, begins and ends. Just as the days and weeks and years of our lives and our generations do, too. Death does not erase the significance of life.

I know when I get back to my mountain home this evening, the leaves will look different. I cannot stop them from falling. This weekend, though, I was comforted by New Jersey’s finest autumn show. The leaves here–and trust me, dear Reader, there are wonderful groves and forests of trees here in this garden state–were abundant and jubilant. I may have missed their peak back home, but here, among people I love so deeply, among the people whose presence in my life anchored me for so long, I was surrounded by beauty.

Endings can be quite beautiful like that.