Everything Else Will Follow

A storm is blowing in, and it should be a good one. Per the established pattern of what has been perhaps the most idyllic summer I can remember, Penny and I had just been commenting how we could use a little rain. And presto! It’s like we’ve got a direct line to the big guy. Or gal, I suppose.

Summer is moving fast. Summer always moves fast, but this one seems more fleeting than usual, probably the result of cold, late spring and the inherent injustice of aging, which of course is that the less time you have left, the more quickly it seems to pass. Man. What’s up with that, anyway? How come all these damn cliches keep coming true?

Sometimes I can’t help but consider how recently it feels that Penny and I bought this land, built a house, had children. Sometimes I can’t help but extrapolate those years forward, measuring them against the sped-up clock of middle age. If it feels like only a few years ago that Fin slept on a pillow between our heads, us fretting over every gurgle and fart, how quickly might the next twelve years pass? If it feels like only a handful of years have has passed since we first stepped foot on this land, what will it feel like 18 years from now, when I think back to that idyllic summer of 2014?

It’s good, you know. I like a small sense of urgency in my life, like the energy I feel on those first chill mornings of late summer, when the intent of the coming season can no longer be denied. Or the urgency of the season’s first sap run: Get the taps in, get the buckets hung, it’s gonna run hard tomorrow. Or the small pressure of the harvest season, each crop ripening of its own accord, offering its own small window for reaping and processing.

I don’t hope for too much, but I do hope to be one of those people who always have too much to do, whose curiosities cannot fit inside one life. I see that in Penny; indeed, it’s one of the things I love so much about her. She is always pining to learn something new and to refine those skills she has learned. I admire that and I realize that the people who fascinate me most are those who are always learning. Not necessarily because they want to be smarter or more skilled or more employable, but because they’re simply interested.

I know how fortunate I am to have found a path early in my adult life that fascinates me, which is really the only person I need to worry about fascinating. But not infrequently, being fascinated means living with the understanding that one life can only accommodate so much. Truth is, I’ll never have all the skills I’d like to have. I’ll never know all the interesting people I’d like to know, hold my sons’ hands all the times I’d like to hold their hands. I’ll never eat as much homemade ice cream as I’d like to eat, though I sure as hell am gonna try.

I’m sure that as I age, there will be times when the perceived brevity of my days on this piece of ground will leave me a little breathless. A little sad. Wanting more of the very thing that can’t be bought or accumulated, but which is being spent every minute of every day. You too, of course. You ain’t getting out of it, either. Death and taxes, baby. Don’t forget it for a second.

I guess this might all sound a little morbid, but why, really? It just is, as inevitable as the first frost of autumn and the way it wilts the pasture grass and the small urgency we feel, goading us to harvest the squash, the carrots. The potatoes can wait a bit, but not too long because a harder frost is coming, driving deeper into the ground. Then snow. That’s inevitable, too, or at least I hope it is. I like snow.

There’s nothing I can do to change the perception that the seasons and years are passing ever more quickly. Not a damn thing. They’re gonna come and go and come again, and irony is, the harder I try to hold onto them, the more slippery they’re sure to become. You can’t catch that stuff no matter how hard you try. If you’re real lucky, you get those little crystalized memories, like the image I hold of the boys etched against the sky at the peak of Melvin’s pasture, pushing their bikes on the way home from driving the cows down for evening chores. Or when they used to play inside the old hollow oak above his barnyard.

So yeah, for me, at least, the trick isn’t trying to slow things down, or to flail against my own perception of time’s passage. That’s a losing battle, a foolish one. The trick is so much simpler than that. It’s the one piece of sage advice I’ll pass along to my boys on the off chance they finally recognize my wisdom and come asking: Be interested. Stay interested.

Everything else will follow.