One Reason Only

Suddenly, it is fall. Not so much the temperature. It is still eerie-warm, the morning fire more luxury than anything else (and why not? We’ve got the wood) – but the trees laid almost bare by a fast-moving storm, the wind and rain furious enough to justify putting off evening chores for an hour or so, just until things died down. And now the gray of everything but for the few survivor leaves, clinging futilely to their perches out of habit more than anything else. They won’t last much longer.

God, I love it. Used to hate it, but that was so many years ago I cannot fathom how or why I might have felt that way. Thought it drab, I suppose, or bemoaned the shortness of daylight, how you can feel dark creeping up on you the whole day through. Or maybe it was what I’d been taught, those common utterances down at the village store: “It’s coming” or “summer short enough for ya’?” or just a shake of the head. But even those more banter than complaint, I think, and perhaps masking the same thing I feel now: Ahhh.

Maybe it’s just that now I know how necessary it is, what a gift it is. We cannot go year round the way we do April to November. Or perhaps we could, but at what cost? Our physical vitality? Our emotional resiliency? Our love of this thing we do, whatever you want to call it? It’s coming near time to shut it down a bit – not completely, of course; there will still be chores and projects that linger and next year’s firewood and whatnot – but enough to feel something like rest. Enough to slip into bed at 7:30 with a book, enough to turn off the light at 8:30 and lie there for a bit with Penny looking at the stars and feeling the cold sneak through the window, cracked just an inch or two so we don’t forget our small place in this world, the tendrils of cold telling us something about what it means to be alive, something I can’t quite put words to but is real nonetheless. Then drifting into the sweet, deep sleep of winter. Asleep before 9:00: An aging couple’s pleasure if every there was one.

This winter we’ll be making plans. We’re changing things up a bit; nothing radical, just tweaking and revising, determining the places where concept has presided over observation. Where we have allowed concept to prevent us from observing. It’s funny the things you pick up without having expected to; this whole notion of conceptualization vs observation having come to from Mark Shephard’s talk some weeks ago. I like it, perhaps because it fits my view of how I wish to pass my days: Not bound by ideology and willing to humble myself to natural forces beyond my control. Of course, both are easier said than done, but that ain’t gonna stop me from trying.

I realized that some people must view our lives as being routine, even static: Hell, we rarely even leave this town anymore (as our old friend David said a couple weeks ago when he stopped by for lunch: “If you guys ever left Cabot, you’d see what’s happened to America”). And there’s a certain truth to that view, I suppose. But it doesn’t feel that way. We are constantly experimenting, learning, shifting, in ways that are both visible and invisible, in ways I can articulate and those I cannot, perhaps because some things should not be fully understood.

I hope this is always the case. I hope that if it’s ever not, it will be for one reason only: Because we’re dead. And even then, well, who can really say?