Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves. We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves. -Humbert Wolfe, (1885-1940)
It is the opening weekend of October and we are ablaze. If you don’t see it now- you don’t see it.
Paul and I try to save Sunday for projects around the farm. Saturday is sometimes a work day: Youth Orchestra, hit the bakery and possibly an adventure. This weekend Saturday was a day where there were forty five minutes between scheduled events. We did our best to notice all of the colors driving to and from a book signing but felt a bit rushed. We know from experience that a sunny weekend for peak foliage is luck-of-the-draw so we felt compelled to take full advantage of viewing on both weekend days. So today we headed the truck toward Peacham, one of our favorite small towns. We decided to drive through Danville as they were having their annual fall foliage craft fair, oohing amd aahing over the brilliant colors along the way. The sun was sparkling off Marshfield dam and the surrounding hillside was reflected in the water. We stopped a few times to take photos to send to our son, Ethan, who lives in LA and who misses Vermont most this time of year.
Music filled the air as did the intoxicating smell of maple popcorn. Time crunched, we did what we call the “whiffle”: quick looks at each booth. I bought a 2023 calendar from a woman who water colors habitats and ate ice cream from the Kingdom Dairy booth. Wandering is more pleasant when you are licking a dripping ice cream cone.
Back in the car we followed the dirt road into the village, stopping to watch cows watch us from under a two hundred year old maple tree in the late afternoon sun. One of the things that makes not only this area, but so much of Vermont special to me is the New England architecture. The white houses with the tilted dark green (important) shutters. They often are capes and colonials but can be found in many different styles. We let the dogs stretch their legs at a local park as we sat on the grass, our legs pushed out straight in front of us. Leaning back on my elbows I looked at the houses near the green, some neatly kept, an American flag flapping from over the front steps, some modernized in such a way that you knew it was inhabited by someone from out of state who visits one or two weeks in the summer. Many others belong to people whose families have owned them for generations. Cared for with a carelessness bred from familiarity; water cans tucked under a spout, children’s bicycles on their side on the front lawn patiently waiting for the missing rider to return, an old barn that once stored hay and housed livestock, now storing holds lawn mowers and discarded family furniture tipped upside down.
I’ve been reading a biography about a family farm which opens with photographs of family members from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. One black and white print showed a young man in worn overalls, a flannel shirt tucked underneath. His dark hair messy with the kind of carelessness that comes from just taking off your hat. He is half smiling from underneath a dark beard and looking directly into the camera at someone he clearly knows well: black eyes serious at being photographed. His huge hands are wrapped around the wooden handles of some kind of wagon and he wears boots worn form work. I didn’t know him but he could easily be one of my sons.
It seemed that if I could lift the corner of that photograph I would be able to see further into his life and be able to watch him turn his head away from the intruding photographer and get on with his work, not cognizant of the fact that he no longer exists. His moment has passed.
The realization that our life is but a moment in time is daunting to me. The idea that everything, every thing, is impermanent can be frightening and wake me from a sound sleep. The very young are ignorant of this fact, the middle-young are blissfully arrogant with their soft, unlined skin and bodies that have not born children or labored at a job. For a while it seems as if their moment is always a hand-stretch away from you, that all of the time in the world, indeed the world itself, belongs to you. It is as you age that you begin to realize that a vast expanse of time is behind you and that the time ahead of you is shrinking.
The knowledge of impermanence is what causes us to ponder the meaning of our lives. As I see it, once we acknowledge its importance we have two choices; to become seriously depressed about our short spin on this planet, or to decide how to create our legacy, to choose the meaning.
The young man in the photograph had that moment. Maybe he was helping his grandfather on the family farm that would, ultimately, one day be his and where he would raise a family. Or maybe he is digging a ditch for a neighbor whose basement had once again become flooded.
If we walk with intention, if we choose work that does more than make money: decide to help, to reach out, to live in a way that gives more than takes, then we may be able to not only find meaning in the things that we are doing with our moment, but transcend time and create meaning in the lives of those who remember us and find our photograph in a dusty album in someone’s attic or in the pages of a book.
This afternoon I stood and watched the wind swirl the colors down from the trees. Their time was finished, but not one of them was worried.