Late Fall

November 11, 2019

Three of our kids are in Europe this week: son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline are visiting Belgium and daughter Laura is visiting friends and doing free-lance work in the U.K., after spending a couple of months working in Costa Rica.

That’s all good. We’re hoping to see them at Thanksgiving or Christmas. We’ve never been to those places, and would like to travel to some exotic locale. But now we’re at home looking out the living room window at the leaves carpeting the back yard. In past years, like everyone else around here, I would be out there raking and sweeping the leaf-blower around like a fencer wielding an epee. We’d drag heavy bags of leaves to the curb. I’d dump some in a mulch pit at a far corner of the yard, with the idea that by spring they would become rich topsoil for planting things. Then we’d watch as the wind deposited another five or ten million leaves.

Gradually it dawned on me that all that work was pointless. What was left of the grass never did any better exposed to the cold winter sun instead of covered with leaves. And the mulch pit never produced much topsoil. I would push the wheelbarrow up the hill in the spring to harvest it, never got a full load.  I can’t say it ever did any good.

I didn’t start this fall ducking the yardwork, I was excused to get over my operation. Just as well, the yard looks okay covered with leaves, a patchwork of bright yellows, reds, and browns, like the trees themselves before they shed. Sure, our front yard stands out among the neighbors’ as an example of suburban yard-care neglect. Passersby glance at the leaf quilt, then up at the house, disapprovingly. I’m okay with that. Actually it cheers me up.

Still, this weekend’s cold snap and the end of the leaf-collecting frenzy reminds me that we are in the dregs of fall, post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving, when it now gets dark earlier and stays dark later, the woods duller and grayer as the leaves disappear, the TV weather people pleased to issue scary forecasts. We’re wearing sweatgear for our walks, and walking faster against the chilling breezes. This is the season when old people feel the pace of time more keenly, in the rush toward the dark end of year.

That could be because lately we botch even happy things: the anticipation of the powerful messages of Thanksgiving and Christmas now is overwhelmed by auto- and furniture-sales advertising and warnings of holiday highway gridlock. You can’t miss all that unless you avoid TV and newspapers, because bad news is what’s news, for example, the next revelation in the Trump impeachment series of revelations, now breaking with blurring speed.

But that isn’t it at all. December, now hurtling towards us, promises cold and darkness, which together hint at the end, out there for all of us, but not so far out for some of us. Still, we’ll look forward to watching the grandsons have fun opening their stuff Christmas morning. Christmas morning passes, in the inexorable passing of those short cold days and long cold nights. Then there’s the fake holiday, New Year’s, which some of us try to enjoy.

The falling of the leaves is a cheap metaphor, sure, but it’s there, impossible to miss if you see metaphysical meaning in things that have none. You get through November and December by living vicariously through the cheerfulness of others, young children and their parents, who stay young for a while through the happiness of their kids. That’s the way it was for us. But then too, God’s eternal lesson for all of us, old folks and everyone else, is the end becoming the beginning. The dark end of the last year begets the start of the next one. The wait seems interminable right now, but we know that winter gives way to spring. Every year. The bleak gray mornings that follow December eventually reveal sunlight a little earlier that lasts a little later in the day, even while the leaves still are piled in the corners of your yard, turning to mulch on their own accord.

That promise of good news seems remote right now, when we’re battered by relentless, soul-devouring commercialism, the empty glibness of political campaigns, cowardice and corruption in the nation’s leadership, and lousy weather.

But we still look forward to gathering at the dark end of the year, maybe traveling exhausting, dangerous miles to join those close to us at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We genuinely are grateful for getting there, and then to make it to church for too-long, too-elaborate services that may only clumsily express the message we are waiting and hoping for. We take the kids, we urge their parents to attend. We oldtimers sit, trying to look forward to the remainder of life, trying to remember to thank the Lord for all we have and all we’ve learned and experienced. And we brace ourselves once again to start over. Then, if we still care, we can hire a teenager to bag the leaves.