A week or so ago I climbed the hill behind our house and flushed a wave of turkeys from the tall grass just beyond my vegetable garden. A dozen of them, or maybe twice as many, hard to tell because they rose in bursts and flew into the trees beyond a field of dancing goldenrod. A month ago they were chicks, and had I surprised them, I would have heard a warning cluck and seen only a stirring in the grass. Now they thought I was after them and exploded with the beating of wings, a sign I take for the season’s change.
From my desk in the morning I hear the screaming jays. They storm the apple trees to hunt the crickets I hear at night when I walk the dog in starlight, that earnest song I’ve heard in all the Augusts of my life. When I was young, I believed they were saying, “Summer’s done, summer’s done.”
Not yet. There will be a few more weeks for swimming, and tomatoes from the garden warm and sweet. Blackberries ripen along the edge of fields, but we are in transition, and these signs have always brought me sadness together with joy. It makes no sense, this remorse. Fall is nearly as sweet as summer and winter too, particularly in Vermont: but no one likes the end of something good. There is the whiff of mortality in these signs at summer’s end.
Mortality isn’t the right word for what I heard as a boy in the cricket song. Let’s call it pre-nostalgia, a fear for something not yet lost because a year is a long time for a boy to wait for summer to come around again. I had the same feeling for the last sip in a bottle of soda I’d used a dime to buy. I’d stare at it sadly because I couldn’t say for sure when I would have another. Sweet-sadness, and for a boy a world with metaphors even he could understand — the end of summer, the drying fields, the withering leaves and the smell of smoke.
Mortality is for adults to ponder, and it occurs to me now in a year when I need two hands to count the friends I’ve lost, that mortality is really about surviving when someone else dies. I remember when we visited our parents after a long absence seeing how they’d aged and diminished in inverse proportion to our growing children. Now those same children are parents and see the equation at work with us. They never speak of it, but we are all mortal. The day we’re born we begin a journey that can end just one way. The surprise along the way is learning that death is less about ourselves than others, the ones we lose along the way, about the pets we outlive, and the sturdy trees that come down in storms. No wonder we feel remorse at summer’s end. Sadness comes with loss and change, and a gentle wisdom follows when we learn to cope.
I love a paradox, so now I wonder why each year I feel less sadness with the signs of change at summer’s end. I think the shift began a decade ago, an August I spent in the hospital with my life at stake. We all were scared, but when I came home, all I had lost was a month from my life. The rest I could reclaim, my lungs and muscles, the stories that I’d missed. The fall was under way when I escaped, the trees streaked with color and the valleys full of mist. The poet Keats was just 26 and really dying when he wrote the words, “(Autumn) . . . thou hast thy music too,” and I had been jarred by my experience into a similar mood. A decade is a long time to think, and now I know I would have eventually come to this understanding without the theatrics of disease.
Last November I had to cut down a balsam tree, one of a pair I wrote about in these pages some years ago. We planted them when our children were young, one apiece to grow as they did, his on the left and hers on the right or the other way around because we lost track. The point was that they were a pair, and they seemed almost sacred for 30 years until one began to die from within. It took a year, a fast descent, but if I’m honest I’ll admit I had noticed years before a gradual thinning in the needles and broken branches on the ground when the snow receded in spring. Taking the tree turned out to be easier than I thought. My son was visiting, and he kept tension with a rope as I worked the saw because we had planted the tree near enough to hit the house if it fell the wrong way. It came down like thunder and released a sweet smell of balsam that lasted for weeks. There was no sadness. The tree was gone, but we still had the story, and in its place we have better light through our bedroom window on winter mornings and a clearer sight line up the hill.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.