October in the Earth

by Olivia Hawker

Love is a thing that’s given, not taken. This is something I know far deep inside, in the quietest part of my soul where loneliness can’t reach, where even fear can’t touch me. I guess I’ve always known, but it’s easy to forget when all your life you’ve heard the same voices shouting that love is obedience, love is a debt unpaid.

The road carried me like the slow drift of a crick in summertime, and together we parted the shadows of the forest, that road and me; we climbed above the valley with its fur of yellow haze, up into the breeze and the birdsongs where I could hear the faintest whisper of my heart.

After so many days of relentless bustle, to sit still and watch the pale stars emerge one by one seemed the grandest blessing the Lord had ever bestowed.

Beyond the opposite bank with its cadre of willows and cottonwoods, the land sloped up almost imperceptibly, rising from the river to the starred and singing hem of night, and the earth that seemed so hostile by day was revealed to me as an expanse of restful shadow and rippling light.

In the delicacy of twilight, in its rapid fade into full night, I understood the impermanence of youth and happiness, of life itself, and every

moment that passed was a treasure I possessed, and each moment was of greater worth than all the fine things Irving had filled our home with—the flowered wallpaper and electric lights, the telephone, the velvet sofa and chairs. What was any of that worth, compared to this? This treasure buried under the grim, brown surface of that year.