An English professor in college once commented that it seems there is always a day, every autumn, when the leaves just fall. It’s not that none fall before that day and none after, but it does seem that, on one day, many and many and many of them fall, so that the world looks Very Different after that day than it did the day before.
I think I missed that day this year. As I have said before, I am walking with my head down most of the time. I haven’t read or written for pleasure, with small exception, for months; I cannot imagine having time. I go from busy-ness to busy-ness; rest is an enforced activity; I abandon the work of the classroom to continue the work of the home, or it is the other way around. But lately I have looked for it, and noticed, and watched with pleasure how a small collection of leaves will escape their tree at once and make their way through a space of sky and eventually to the ground.
Outside my window the neighbor’s house is slowly coming into view. It disappeared steadily over the month of April, when the chartreuse lace of newborn leaves expanded to a shifting green curtain. I am guessing that, at the rate the leaves are falling, we’ll have a clear view of their house by the end of the week.
***
When I got home on Thursday, I was sure it was time to ward off a pending cold with a good nap. But some of the neighborhood children were outside, and Emma Grace declared she would play with them. Then Everett announced he would roller blade. And when I got out of the car, the air was warm and the sky bright, a wind was chasing leaves in scattered handfuls and there, by my front door, were the pansies and ornamental cabbage I had bought last Sunday.
I bailed on the nap and planted them immediately. I also planted some bulbs—hyacinth and daffodil.
There are two things I pray over other than people. Well, maybe three, as I’ve been known, on occasion, to pray about the weather. But I always pray over bread when I proof the yeast and, later, set it out to rise and, later still, when I put it in the oven. And I always pray over bulbs.
I can’t say why. But now that I think about it, I guess that with these things I feel a definite lack of power. I do all I can for the yeast. I do all I can for the bulbs. But ultimately Something Other than I will coax life from them and, in both cases, Life is something I really really want.
And so there I am, on my knees in the soil, dirt caked under my fingernails, and I am breathing into the ground, and the ground is breathing back at me the rich damp smell of earth. I am pushing dirt over the bulb; it is disappearing from view; and I am whispering, “Grow. Grow. Grow.”
I am especially hopeful about the hyacinths.
***
I was in the yard again yesterday. I went out early, before nine a.m. The sun was low, as it is this time of year, and I was the only one in my neighborhood working in the yard. I pruned with what might be considered viciousness the dwarf myrtle in our front yard, but this is because it has become anything but a dwarf and this annoys me. And then I pruned my roses.
It is time to cut them all the way back, and this I was doing. This was a lovely task, less because of the roses themselves than because of the atmosphere that was Saturday morning. Again and again I was interrupted by the small wind that stirred newly bared branches or sent stiff oak leaves scraping across our roof. I stopped to watch still-clinging yellow leaves flatten and bend in that wind. I watched the slanting light fall through the misted air.
I am glad to see the bare branches appear. I am glad for the new and honest light that makes its way through my windows now, and that more of it will come. I am glad, as ever, to see the architecture of the trees. I love the summer trees, make no mistake. But there is something about the bare trees, and about them right now, newly exposed. It feels like being told the truth somehow, after you’ve been hearing stories for a Long Time.
***
On Friday I was in faculty meetings all day. We talked about creativity in the classroom; we talked about safety. We chatted and laughed and had lunch together and enjoyed each other’s company. And when the day was over, I spent another hour in a nearby library, gathering books for my students and their research papers. And then I went to tworivers’ house.
Tworivers had my boys, you see. Or I should rather say that her gentle Lord Byron and son Scott had my boys. But tworivers made it home from work in time to see me, and the two of us went out to her deck for the space of a half hour and looked at how the trees stood out against the edge of the woods. We sat and we talked some, and we watched the sky growing dark between the trees until it was time to go home.
Tworivers brought me hyacinths once. She brought me pink ones, in a pot, on a random day in January. Two of the bulbs that I dropped into the earth the other day were the very same ones that she had brought to me, blooming, that long time ago. And it’s good, you know, after a long day and a long week with people you don’t know, to sit quietly for a while and look at the trees with someone who knows how you feel about hyacinths.
