Friday, August 29, 2008

Tasting the Fruit

“Live in each season
as it passes;
breathe the air,
drink the drink,
taste the fruit,
and resign yourself to
the influences of each.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

There’s a certain mournful indolence to these waning days of summer. I just don’t want it to end, so I purposely slog along, wallowing in all the lovely sunshine and breathing in the crisp morning air that has graced our days, storing up, shoring up, down to my bones, for the long cold winter that’s coming. Dressing these last August days in the slower summer shuffle of intentional spontaneity is a desperate, futile attempt to somehow avert the incoming tide of the post-Labor Day routine, that is at once both welcome and wretched, spinning our time into neat little boxes to be filled with art classes and soccer practices and ever-orchestrated play dates. The discombobulated, every-which-way rhythms of summer are about to give way to a more refined, orderly routine, and I’m simply not done. There’s much creativity and freedom to be found in discombobulating. Oh, if only summer would last a little longer! I’d like to discombobulate a little longer.

The usual, intrusive back-to-school marketing blitz and media assault, from the damn catalogs that stuff my mail box with fall colors and apple picking images to the store displays of school supplies and Halloween candy, jumpstarted the fall season back in early August, threatening to snuff all the fun out of the remaining days of summer. Just when the weather turned from dismally damp and grey to brilliantly bright and blue, and the air suddenly snapped out of the tropical humidity stranglehold and washed through with a refreshing, cleansing energy, the push towards the end of summer began. I've never appreciated this premature drive to discard the finer days of summer and rush into someone's idea of the perfect New England fall--and this year it was even more pronounced, this feeling that someone was yanking my summer right out from under me, and so, I yanked back, and ran the other way, to soak up every last ray of unfettered sunshine and latch on to each and every moment of unhurried bliss.
And it’s been absolutely beautiful. Despite the fact that the herald won’t officially usher in fall for another three weeks, there’s still plenty of summer to be squeezed out of this season. These days, when summer’s growth starts to slow amidst mounting signs of death and decay— fat spiders bathing their yellow bellies in the sun amidst the crinkly browning of the leaves, the light, earthy smell creeping out of the woods, the overgrowth of garden rot and neglect tumbling its wildness over lawn and meadow—there are other signs that this late summer season, of luscious, ripening fruit, of bountiful harvest, of shifting, glorious weather, is just beginning. Get carried away by the rush to abandon summer and embrace this falsely contrived back-to-school fall, and it’s easy to miss the subtleties of summer’s last gasp.

The other morning, while a friend and I sat on a curb in a park, talking about all the twists and loops and spirals of life, a perfectly yellowed leaf, its edges jagged with teeth, suddenly appeared before us, alighting on the ground as if to join our conversation. Change, it seemed to say for both of us, is on the horizon. And it’s true; despite my denial, fall is coming, and with it, change. It whispers in the winds that have started to spiral down these first yellow and red leaves, now appearing in isolated patches along the edges of our wetlands, and soon, in flaming salutes to the sun at the tops of the trees. It shows its face in the sun, too, shifting lower and lower in the sky each day to cast longer, deeper, cooler shadows across the day. And it beckons and teases, in the cool, dewy mornings and chilly evenings, in the bright return to the yellows and russets of early spring, in the snap and tartness of the first fall apples.

The stripeys are back, too, bright green caterpillars that arrive each summer at our potted parsley plants to beef up in preparation for their long, arduous overwintering, before emerging in the spring as black swallowtail butterflies. The milkweed still stands tall in the garden, its leaves well-sampled by visiting monarch caterpillars, and its purses of seed pods full and ripe and green, ready to dry and burst and spread parachutes of milkweed seed across the land. Fields and meadows blaze yellow with goldenrod, where the dog has taken up her part-time job as a seed disperser, returning from her forays into the edge of the woods to retrieve Frisbees and tennis balls full of burrs.

We’ve had a string of sunny days, giving us the sense that it’ll last forever, but it won’t, because, alas, it never does.

As life tries to push me back into the frenzied pace that left me temporarily derailed this past year, I go about my days acutely aware of my mission:

To spend this day in each moment, and each moment in this day, slowing down and refocusing my attention on the simple beauty around me, noticing the details, the delicate orange pronged horns that suddenly appear atop the caterpillars’ bulbous heads when touched, the tickle of grass beneath bared feet, the changing colors and landscape of the sky; feeling the lightness of gratitude as we bring in our first harvest of peaches and apples from our small, ungainly trees, taste the first fall raspberries, plump with flavor, and make a meal from our garden crop; immersing myself in the sounds of the evening orchestra—katydids, cicadas, crickets, owls, coyotes, frogs; and taking the time to find a few favorite constellations in the night sky with the boys, and feel the threads and connections that tie and tether and ground us amidst our haste to spiral out of this world. To have a Mary Oliver Summer Day before they are all gone, that is what I wish for today. Small measures of exaltation, all.

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