2013 Pumpkin harvest
As the light fades and the pumpkins orange, it’s hard not to look back on the summer and wonder how it passed by so quickly. Oh, this year, I was a little better at getting away: I managed two fishing trips to Canada, one with my aging father and one with my ever-sprouting teen. Even with a multitude of complex trials at work and Jack’s soccer games and tending the vegetable garden and all the rest, I found space to enjoy life. But that space seems, in retrospect, awfully short-lived. Up here in the North Country, one senses, all scientific data aside, that time compresses from May through September and enlarges and extends and seemingly slows to a crawl when the seasons shift, when the sun’s rays seem to dwindle, when the harvest is done. Of course, this isn’t so. A month is a month, whether it’s gauged against summer or autumn or winter light. Still, I stand by my observation. Thirty days in July leaves one feeling short-changed, cheated. Thirty days in October, despite the glory of nature’s color scheme, feels elongated, extended. The suspension of time that arrives with falling leaves is a harbinger of winter’s inexorable crawl. Even the extension of the growing season this year, which saw crops a full month behind schedule, did little to alter the whirl of the hands of the summer clock. Hell, as I write this piece, the last of Rene’s very large tomato crop ripens on our kitchen counter, the green skins reddening months after harvest. But even with reminders of August lingering into November, this summer seemed to rush past me like an unexpected grouse taking flight.
Ripening tomatoes.
Life, unfortunately, mimicks this phenomenon. All of us, I am certain, remember the summers we spent as kids. I’m sure the emotions I recall are universal. As children, we could not wait; we fairly sprinted for the doors when school let out in early June. Freedom, blessed freedom, and the promise of bike riding, trench ball, fishing at Engwall’s pond, pick-up softball games, Saturday matinees at the Grand or the Norshor or the Lyceum or the West or the Granada theaters, or golf outings at Enger followed by dips in the murky but cool waters of Twin Ponds, awaited us as the doors to Piedmont Elementary slammed shut. By mid-July, once the shine of summer had been worn off by frenzy and familiarity, we were bored, listless, done in by the heat and extended time. Our thoughts began to migrate to the upcoming school year and to the onset of autumn when we would enter a new grade, meet new friends, and share new experiences. By January, as snowbanks rose to cover window sills, as temperatures plunged below zero, as night fell within an hour of our release from school, the slow, dawdling advance of the calendar forced us to look ahead. We couldn’t wait for spring, for the coming of the rains and the mud and the greening, and with it, the promise of Little League, and games of marbles played with vigor on the way to and from school, and for renewed contests of four-square, hop scotch, trench ball, dodge ball, and tag. The wet, drizzly, cold spring seemed to last forever until, miracle of miracles, it was June and we were again released from bondage to contemplate a universe of freedom, at least until the cycle of midsummer boredom returned. Between each change of seasons, time seemed, in the throes of childhood (to resort to a cliche’) to stand still.
Adulthood doesn’t follow a similar pattern. At least not for me. Though it’s not universal and I do not feel the acceleration of time every day or every hour, there being times when things do indeed slow down and mirror the calendar of my youth (such as when I’m on vacation, away from work, the house, and responsibility), most days and weeks and months, the clock feels to be churning ahead at an ever-increasing rate. Why this is so, I can’t say. But I know I am not alone in chronicling this feature of maturity. Sometimes, when considering this conundrum, I Imagine what time must be like for dogs. After all, even the smallest ankle biter, the sort of canine that lives an inordinately long dog life, gets at best, fifteen years. That’s a fifth of the time we humans typically exist. Do dogs know this? Do their limited life spans begin with the same slowly patient youth only to lurch forward with ever-increasing velocity? I have no idea but I have the suspicion that Kena, our new Labrador pup, isn’t thinking in those terms. She seems far more interested in dragging dead deer parts home than engaging in philosophical contemplation.
Kena and the sleeping vegetable garden.
I had a dream last night that some bit of my writing, a piece I didn’t recognize and likely haven’t written yet, was being recited by Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion. Given the maudlin tenor of this essay, I doubt the great sage of Minnesota letters will be wrapping his heart around this piece and reading it in public. It really wouldn’t fit in with the cheery vibe of his show. And while it’s highly unlikely that a man I’ve only met once in my life, whose bookstore has never invited me within its walls for a book signing or reading, knows who the hell I am or cares one iota for my prose, that scene, where Keillor was reading to America from a Mark Munger original, when scrutinized under the flickering light of rapidly advancing time, intrigues me.
Is God sending me a message?
A summer day when time slowed down…
There are any number of explanations for such dreams. Wishful thinking is at the top of the list. Too much taco salad for dinner resulting in indigestion, a cause ascribed by Scrooge for his immersion in ghosts, might be another. But maybe my dream, in the face of seasonal melancholy, was truly a message from the divine, an invitation to set aside my trepidation of an accelerating internal clock and simply be. That’s right. Be.
As I write this, as I listen to Mountain Stage (being broadcast from Grand Marais, Minnesota I might add) and try to place one word ahead of the next in coherent order, plucking and pasting photos from the iPhoto program on my iMac to highlight my thoughts, things are slower than they have been in quite a while. I find myself straining, over the music and the tapping of the keyboard, straining to hear just what it is Garrison is reading. I think I hear the beginnings of a story I knew once, that I intended to write but haven’t yet put to paper. The experience of listening to the future, to my future, unfolds unhurriedly. Canada geese call from the river below my window. A blue jaw caws. The autumn sky stands folded like a quilt over a silent, monochromatic land. I hear a small, clear voice inside my head. I have no idea if it’s God’s or Garrison’s.
There is time.
I don’t really care who’s talking to me. I just need to listen.
Peace.
Mark
