Aprons of fruit spread beneath our wild apple trees, food for deer and turkeys and, lately, a porcupine. The deer, their coats changing color with the season, are sporadic visitors because the woods too are abundant with food. They are taking on weight for a winter some of them will not survive. Some will be taken by hunters before the winter arrives. One way I prepare for winter is by raking the apples into tight rings around the tree trunks to feed the deer well into the new year. They will appear at twilight and use their hooves to dig through the snow to mine the frozen fruit.
At my age, mortality is everywhere I look. I remember that when I was younger, I used to feel a profound sadness at summer’s end — the end of swimming and short pants and days without school bells — but now fall to me is a rich, sweet smell when my path leaves a meadow and enters the woods. Is it the dying asters or the ferns that release this hint of cinnamon as they wither? There is subtle beauty in this transition and a hopeful motif of life going on.
My granddaughter is crazy about the swing I hung last spring from a beam between two maple trees. “Faster!” she cries when I push her, which means higher so she can kick the yellow leaves dangling from a branch high over her head. At 3½, she knows nothing about mortality. One day she’ll abandon this swing for a bicycle, and then some years later abandon the bicycle for an electric car that can go from zero to 60 in three seconds.
My first brush with death as a child is now a memory planted in my brain by my parents. A few years older than my granddaughter at the time, I was sitting high in the stands of a football stadium watching a game with my family when a man in the seat next to me, a stranger, leaned heavily against me as if he were following the flight of a touchdown pass. My mother rose quickly, took my hand, and led me to the concession stand beneath the stadium for a hot dog, wonderfully strange behavior for someone who did not believe in eating between meals.
By the time we returned to our seats, I’d finished my hot dog and the man, who had died on the spot from a heart attack, had been carried away. Several years passed before I heard the entire story, and by then the genre of the drama had changed to comedy. Now it sits in my head as a vivid reminder, more about the fierce protectiveness of my mother than the omnipresence of death.
I think I am lucky to be able to think about mortality with humor. I’m aware that this perspective could change in an instant, but on a gorgeous fall day I see the beauty in decay, and in the decay the promise of a lush, green spring.
I remember believing when I was young and cocky that without mortality as a prod, no work would ever get done and that people would sit around bored as teenagers. Death to me was a distant abstraction, like my birth, and the two events seemed like invisible brackets around the endless present I inhabited. Not once did I imagine what it would be like to be a grandfather. But now my perspective is different. Having lost friends of my age and nearly everyone from my parents’ generation, I know that death is no abstraction. Still, most of the time what I see, rather than the dwindling fraction of my own life, is the cycle itself and the expanding lives of my children and grandchildren.
Of course, the haunting truth of climate change runs contrary to these grand and sanguine thoughts, and there are prophets who use science to predict the precise year human life on this planet will end. The only way I can look at this predicament is bi-focally, one lens outward and responsible and capable of moral outrage, and the other interior and aesthetic. Using the former, I try to reduce my carbon footprint and cast votes only for candidates committing to mitigating climate change; using the latter, I focus sentimentally on the daily adventures of my family.
One day not long ago, my wife mused that if we were suddenly to disappear, our granddaughter, who has been a large part of our lives over the past 2½ years, would gradually lose her memory of us. She uttered these words as a simple truth, without self-pity, and I remembered her voicing the same sentiment when our grandsons were at the same stage in their lives. But the truth is that their memories will be nurtured by stories and imagination and by all the pictures of us stored in the “cloud.”
Sometimes I regret that my own parents aren’t still alive to see my family as it is today. They were both scientists and would be pleased to know that my daughter became a doctor and my son a digital engineer. I see now that by writing these words I have almost brought them back, and I can hear them wryly tease me about heredity skipping a generation in our family.
The weatherman is promising a killer frost tonight. It’s time to pick the un-ripened peppers and the last of the lettuce and greens. Overnight most of the garden will turn brown and die, but I know there are gorgeous days ahead. I will kick up a storm of leaves when I walk in the woods, and the lush green of hayfields in October will always startle me. At night, after walking my dog, I’ll check the porch thermometer and think that there’s no reason to believe this cycle can’t go on forever, whether we are here or not.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.