Change of Season, Land of Promise
I’ve cozied up the living room, replacing the thinner spring and summer couch throws with vintage quilts and flannel blankets you’d never want to leave once you’re ensconced in them. A pot of Italian tomato and butter bean soup is warming on the stove and the aroma is trying to pull me into the kitchen. I’m resisting but barely, on the knife’s edge of temptation. It’s a simple recipe from my late father-in-law, Larry, that includes half a cup of red wine to mingle with the caramelized onions and crushed tomatoes. Hey, any day that begins by adding a half cup of Cabernet to something is going to be a good one.
Autumn is in full technicolor swing here, making the daily commute to work even more of a pleasure and the morning walks nothing short of stop-you-in-your-tracks spectacular. As I pass beneath the towering cottonwoods in the far northeast corner of the woods, I’m craning my neck to see if that one last leaf at the top is going to finally unhook itself in the wind and free fall to the forest floor. But walking while looking up isn’t the best combination if you’re wanting to stay upright. My feet meander aimlessly into a randomly corrugated and mole-hilled section of the path and, still looking up, I careen into a sycamore sapling that refuses to step aside. Looks like that leaf will need to fall without my bearing witness to it. I rub my arm where it met the sampling’s hard cold trunk and keep moving.
On a bright and cloudless Wednesday morning last week, heading across the front porch to the car, I turned and watched, mesmerized, as the silver maple behind the house set to dropping her leaves in a hypnotic swirling spectacle, each one a glowing topaz jewel catching its own thermal on the way down. They landed soundlessly, one after the other in silently rapid succession. I couldn’t look away, didn’t want to be anywhere but there in that moment, pure gold collecting at my feet and hers in a soft pelt of summer’s remembrance. How I even made it to work that day, I can’t tell you. I must have, because our checking account reflects a direct deposit from payroll. But I was rich even before I pulled into the parking lot.
It occurs to me on a humbling and regular basis that this place we call home has kept its promises, each and every one, since we unpacked the last box on that Easter afternoon in April and gathered family in a circle for the land blessing on that unforgettable Sunday in July some twenty-two years ago where my devout Catholic mother took in the prayers of our tiospaye when the firekeeper handed the pipe over to her. In that arc of time, we’ve slept beneath 283 full moons, shoveled and mopped up and planted and harvested our way through 88 seasons and kept a 100-year-old farmhouse standing through it all (fingers crossed, we’ll see it through to the other side of its twenty-third winter). We’ve been sheltered, challenged, protected and stunned in equal measure by what a landlocked rectangle of cornfield-turned-woods and meadow can offer up, from hidden yet vocal coyotes to comical squirrels to red-tail hawks and their flap flap glide…flap flap g-l-i-d-e flight patterns over our grateful heads. If I’m quiet, I can hear the echoes of family cookouts, bonfires down by the old old goat barn and impromptu scavenger hunts with our friends’ children as they laughed their way through the meadow looking to fill the grocery bags dangling from their fingertips with acorns and those ankle-turning fallen black walnuts that collect pretty much everywhere. In the spaces between the projects and obligations in our over-scheduled days, these sweet memories rise and settle themselves in full view of our consideration. We give them our attention and our time without hesitation.
Ever so often, I find myself in the grip of my own worries, wondering how we’ll manage as we keep getting older, where we’ll end up if we can’t stay here until our last breath. I imagine that final trip down the gravel driveway and a deep, piercing sadness closes itself around my heart. I’ve fallen inextricably in love with this place, no hope for recovering. Love. Nothing less than helpless, in up to my neck kind of love, the seed of all grief. We’ve handed over the keys to our happiness and this place just keeps outstripping our dreamy expectations, getting under our skin with its generous beauty. As the leaves keep falling, so do I.
Such love comes at a price and I’m willing to pay it. I’ll keep walking, noticing, planting and harvesting, reveling in it and carefully tending to it, as often as I can, for as long as I can.
That’s my promise to her.
