The breezy, mid-September afternoon seemed like a good time to harvest pumpkins with our granddaughters. In late May I had planted two seeds in the manure pile outside our fenced-in garden, and by mid-September there were more than a dozen of them the size of beachballs, peeking out from a wild tangle of vines. As we were filling a wheelbarrow with the last load, our youngest grandchild, a first-grader with a keen eye for flowers, pointed to a yellow blossom at the end of a long vine and a green nub behind it, the start of a new pumpkin.
“Will it grow?” her sister, a fifth-grader, whispered, and I said there wouldn’t be time with the first frost just a week or two away. Kids are smart, especially one’s grandchildren, so I imagined that her silence meant that she was mulling an existential question. Yes — What’s the point? — exactly what I was thinking, but because she never put her question into words, I was off the hook.
Not for long. A few days later I was on my tractor, squeezing a trailer-load of firewood between my tool shed and the manure pile. My tires missed that same yellow flower by just inches, as I heard through my earphones the unmistakable voice of Tom Waits croak a bitter refrain:
“Misery is the river of the world
Misery is the river of the world
Misery is the river of the world”
Flower and song, song and flower, the contrast couldn’t have been sharper. A scene like this in a piece of fiction would seem contrived, but there they were in the imagery of real life, in my life, the paradox of my granddaughter’s unspoken question and something to think about as I unloaded wood. What is the point?
We live on a hilltop surrounded by nature, and daily I am struck by the beauty of the world. My playlists, on the other hand, are filled with expressions of misery and failure. When I am happily doing physical work in a beautiful setting, I turn for company to these expressions of frustration and sadness. Why?
Before this retired life of voluntary labor, I taught literature and writing to teenagers. They were young and exuberant and for the most part happy, but the literature they took to most naturally was not comedy, but tragedy. For years I believed that comedy was just too subtle to compete for their attention with lust and murder, but gradually I came to realize that teenagers, like the adults they will soon be, like to inch close to the metaphoric cliff and look into the abyss. Literature is a safe place to do this, and so are songs.
A week after we harvested the pumpkins, I returned to the patch with the younger granddaughter. The flower she had spotted a week earlier was gone, but the small pumpkin behind it had swelled to the size of a croquet ball. Delighted, no Tom Waits earworm playing in her head, she counted eight, nine, 10 of them, small pumpkins looking like their harvested siblings had way back in July. They won’t make it, but in her six-year-old wisdom, she knows there will be pumpkins next year and the next, pumpkins every year (somewhere) until she is one day a grandmother herself, mulling thoughts like these.
Meanwhile, I believe her older sister senses the tragedy in this season of the year. The hanging plants on my porch, brilliant with color since Mother’s Day, are still pushing out blossoms as leaves fall from the trees. The grass around our home has perked up and now is as green as it was in June. Inside the garden fence, bean vines continue to climb toward the sky as if they have no idea what lies ahead.
In tragedy, in sad songs and the blues, there is always a glimmer of hope. In the Tom Waits song, I find it in a couplet that comes around twice:
“You can drive out nature with a pitchfork
But it always keeps roaring back again.”
In the song, nature means human nature, and in context his words are anything but hopeful. But here where I am surrounded by beauty and keenly aware that after five brutal months there will be coltsfoot blooming on roadsides when the snow melts, I hear what I need to hear, two meanings for nature, where the second one means Nature.
Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.