Last week the ordinary stuttered into extraordinary: our first lamb was born. My eldest son Eli delivered the news in a phone call to me when he went to the barn to close up the animals.
“Mom, I think there’s someone here you’ll want to meet,” he simply said, without offering more.
My first thought was one of my father’s old friends had stopped by looking for him, having seen the glow of light on in the barn, since for decades my father could always be found at this time of night milking our cows. But I was wrong. I was surprised how long it took me to even consider the alternative: Juliette, our rare Leicester Longwool sheep had given birth to her long-awaited lamb.
I had days before started a blog post I hadn’t yet finished entitled, “(STILL) Waiting on the Damn Lamb.” I had done preliminary research on buying a “lamb-cam,” since the word lamb irresistibly lends itself to word play of all sorts. “Lam(b)enting the wait for a lamb is a lamb-able offense,” I had written to no one in particular, as I failed to hit the publish button on that blog post for good reason. But the truth is, I was a combination of annoyed and worried by what seemed like the longest pregnancy on record for a sheep. Wasn’t there something I should be doing? Aren’t we always waiting on some proverbial lamb?
Lulu lamb with her mother, Juliette.
When I got to the barn that night, Eli was standing quietly by a tiny wet, white lamb and her mother. A separate peace had descended on the pen. Something about the scene made both Eli and I whisper to each other a mixture of instructions and excitement.
“Oh my gosh. She’s so beautiful.”
“We have to get the heat lamp on and get Juliette extra hay.”
“Oh, look at her little tail wagging!”
“Call your brothers and dad.”
All of a sudden there was so much to do; and yet there was nothing at all needed. The sense of peace in the barn stood thick like a protective fog, while we toggled back and forth between it and our desire to play a part.
For months I had procured information about lambing and tools were safely stashed in a chest we called our “lambing kit.” But now there stood a perfectly healthy lamb, still wet and rooting her mother’s under carriage to latch on. The lamb would occasionally lose balance. Or her knees would buckle to the ground. But she’d build her way back to firm purchase, discovering each nob of her legs unfurled like a jointed ruler.
Yes, this was a certain kind of peace, I thought, as I watched Lulu nurse. After all the waiting and preparation, the real surprise was to find such deep peace in not being needed at all.
I saw a pair of ducks this afternoon, a male and female mallard.
A hard, northwest wind had just begun to bow the smaller pines;
clouds were gathering as the sky suddenly became a drop ceiling.
A storm was coming down the river.
The ducks seemed stalwart against the wind,
though you wouldn’t know it at a quick glance.
They appeared to be treading water to keep from losing ground.
The river crested over a fallen log in their path, sending flecks of water
like shards of glass lit sideways from the storm’s scarce light.
I wondered if they were tired, or felt deterred.
Was that log stopping them on a return trip to their nest?
When would they start to slip backwards into the ease of the current?
Just as I thought they might turn away, the male scooped his
jewel-toned green head into the splash of water coming over the log,
sending rivulets beading down his back. The female followed,
diving stiff-bodied, sending a beak full of spray under
her shimmering wings upon surfacing.
Two, three, then four more times they let the now
growing cascade of water wash over them,
as they fluttered and opened their feathers like so many fingers
on a hand ready to receive an offering.
I, too, tipped my face towards a wash of rain, now falling,
my palms open to thick drops of days
that must be calculated not by what is lost,
but rather what we find as we struggle to regain.
Juliette, a rare Leicester Longwool heritage breed, this past fall.
I was drinking coffee while doing chores in the dairy barn this morning when the vet, Rosario, showed up. “Thank you for coming!” I said, stepping out into the frigid air to greet her, clutching my mug to warm my hands. Rosario looked up to introduce herself, offered an outstretched hand, and hit the ground hard. Her rubber boots were no match for the unseasonable slick of ice left on the slanted ground.
The morning had started badly for me, too, so I was sure she might be hurt. I ran to her side to help her up. But she rose nimbly, brushed herself off, and then took my outstretched hand, “What? No hat in this weather?” she chided as we shook hands. I laughed.
She was there to provide a certificate of health for the ram we had on loan from a farm in New Hampshire that we are planning to return this weekend. You can’t bring an animal across state lines without one. There are so many things you realize you have no idea even exist until you jump into something like raising lambs. “Who knew?” is a familiar, if humbling, refrain for me.
As she examined Theo, she gave me advice and made positive comments about the condition of the barn: “Be on the lookout for hoof-rot. Once you have it, you won’t be able to get rid of it,” she warned. “But I can see from the condition of your bedding that you’re not likely to have it. Things look very well-kept here.”
“Aren’t you beautiful, Theo?” she coo’ed to him.
“He’s just the perfect weight, too. We rate them on a 1 to 5 scale and he’s a 3–exactly where we like to see them.”
Pride started to raise in my chest. I felt like I did when the pediatrician would tell me I was doing a great job when my children were babies: like someone had handed me a life-ring, which also meant she could see I was barely still treading water. The sheer kindness of the comment washed over me like a wave; I was surprised to tear up a little.
We chatted while she worked, updating the shots for our other two female lambs, giving me advice on lambing. “Can you tell if their bred,” I asked?
“No. Not really,” she answered.
“Oh, well,” I sighed, as I listened to the litany of signs. “They’ll bag out about six weeks before, though that’s notoriously unreliable. You’ll also notice lengthening in their vulva, and they’ll stop eating too.”
“Just like a cow,” I offered, trying to appear at least somewhat knowledgable.
“Yes, exactly,” she said. “But there’s one sign that’s always reliable,” she offered.
“There’s this ligament on the top of their tale that is taut like a pencil on either side. Just before they lamb it softens,” she instructed, taking my hand to feel the hard ridges. Once I found it, she described the jelly-like feel I’m looking for, equating it to the way our own hips became slack just before we gave birth.
“All animals have it,” she added for good measure. “It allows the hips to open for the baby to pass through the birth canal.”
“Ok, I’ll just keep an eye on them and then when I think they’re close, I’ll check the ligament,” I summarized.
“Yes. That’s a good way to handle it.”
Dr. Rosario filling out paperwork for the ram to cross state lines and return to his farm in New Hampshire.
“I have an ultrasound machine in my car. We can tell for sure if they are bred. Do you want me to get it?” she suddenly offered.
“Yes! I do,” I gasped, realizing immediately what she had done in holding back that critical information. She was putting herself out of a job by teaching me to do the work myself. She was reminding me that farmers deliver babies, trim hooves, give shots. She was, in fact, telling me not to call her.
As she retrieved the ultrasound from her car, I talked quietly to the lambs. “We’re going to find out if you’re going to have a lamb, Juliette.” And then it hit me: we’re going to find out if we are going to have lambs.
The ultrasound screen lit up with white halos around dark valleys, as she depressed the handle along the side of Juniper first. Things were moving; I thought I saw something round. “See that circle?” she asked.
“Um. I think so.” I squinted.
“That’s the lamb,” she said.
As she pressed the wand deeper into Juniper’s abdomen, something flickered. “And, there’s the heart-beat.”
This morning, I had seen the first blue bird of the season. Now I know assuredly that Juniper is going to lamb sometime this spring. Juliette is expected to have twins. Only time will tell how lambing will go, but I’m off to buy gel, rubber gloves, and a stethoscope to assist in their births as instructed by Rosario. For now, the bluebirds are back.
For the last several days, I have been collecting eggs for our incubator. It’s a spring task that a hardened criminal could get behind.
Since only still warm eggs can be successfully hatched, my morning chore requires sorting eggs by their temperature. It’s blustery and snowing here at the farm, so I’m wearing gloves and a furry hat with ear-flaps. I remove my gloves to collect the eggs to assess the temperature of each individual egg.
I approach the first clutch of eight eggs, which are a varied mix of colors suggesting antique porcelain, paper bags, sea glass.
The first few eggs are stone cold, so I put them in the egg basket with a plunk. The fourth egg is so warm that I resist a strange unbidden urge to nestle it up against my cheek. I put the egg in the pocket of my barn jacket.
The next egg feels slightly warm; or so I think. I grab one of the cold eggs in my other hand to compare. “Yup. It’s warm,” I say out loud to the hen in the neighboring nesting box. She coos seeming approval and I pop it into my pocket.
I have seven warm eggs across my two coat pockets when I finish collecting all sixty-four eggs. Their combined heat warms my pockets in a way that I can feel through the thick insulation of my coat.
Hatching chicks is the trifecta of farm work, I think to myself, gently patting my pockets. Everything on a farm turns like a wheel of deadly routine. But this morning, that wheel has stuttered to a near halt. Something different is a afoot. There is a soothing sense of acceptance, mystery, patience perhaps, as if some mystery had fogged a window, leaving a quiet, yet reassuring note. One that I could have easily missed.
I’m finished tending to the chickens now, so it’s time to leave the barn. But I do not button my coat for fear that the strain across the pockets will break the eggs. So I hug my coat closed and lower my head against the wind as I cross the road and make my way back to the farmhouse.
Winter is calling out one more time, reluctant to leave. The ice is pelting my brow as I navigate the slippery slope of the driveway. I gently pat my pockets. The warm eggs are like a secret talisman. They are a faint whisper against the wind: there is always this.
I have collected another sixteen eggs over the past days that are safely tucked inside awaiting their incubator mates. In 21 days, with the grace of nature about 80% of those eggs will hatch out into chicks. At least one of those chicks will have a life threatening deformation, and it will likely die with the first 24 hours. But the rest will grow into hens and roosters that will lay and fertilize next spring’s brood. The torch will assuredly be passed.
I consider how spring is the pat metaphor for how everything that ails us runs in a river of time whose only consistency is its cycles of decay and renewal. But as of late I am more struck by those times when we have fallen entirely out of the path of the river and can find no shore; of the times when hope, like warm eggs, is in shorter supply.
I am reminded of a poem I wrote on Thanksgiving when winter had unexpectedly wheeled into gear.
The Hinge I love this world. And not just in morning, when the long, dark drug of night opens like a clam to the light.
I love the hinge itself that swings back and forth as the tide washes over; an attempt at renewal.
I love not just the mighty whale but the plumes of his excrement, that feed the tiniest plants, that create the air we breathe.
I love not just a seat at the table, But the debt we owe each time we eat, a holy communion with mineral, vegetable, or animal given.
I love not just the beauty of rivers leading to oceans, but also the black sucking microbrial muck raising nutrients up foodwebs like spirit.
I love this world, which suggests something whole in the valleys between wave crests and a chance at forgiveness.
I know it’s true for so many of us at times: hope can sometimes feel completely and utterly out of reach. Even then routine can be slowed down and seen with our newly shaded eyes, meaning can be found in the guts of the ordinary, and even in the dark there might be something worthy of a muttered sigh.
It’s March and it’s cold and snowing. And I have warm eggs in my pockets. Hallelujah, any way!
1. All week a peregrine falcon has been stalking our chickens from the remains of a dead tree on the edge of the barnyard. This morning, we found the falcon inside with the chickens in the coop. This top predator, built like a torpedo and armed with talons, had spent the entire night closed up with the hens and three roosters and not a bird was harmed. He calmly flew away when we opened the door, leaving this feather as a calling card.
2. Two years ago, I lost my patience with a burgeoning mice population in our barn. Evenings I’d close up the hens to find upwards to thirty mice lined up in the chicken feed hoppers, as if it were a Vegas buffet table. They were eating a significant amount of grain, so I became aggressive about laying traps and poison. I felt nothing short of shame when I saw the destruction. In one morning I picked up about 50 dead mice and with a prayer of regret returned them to the woods.
Immediately following our coop came under siege by a weasel, with 3-5 birds killed a night, amounting to over 50 birds lost by the time it was over. Our quest to rid the barn of the weasel stopped just short of the last scene in Caddyshack, where Bill Murray’s character finally rids the golf course of the gopher by blowing up the entire thing. Many months later I read that weasel populations rely on native mice for their food.
3. Sometimes things go unusually well in the henhouse. Up to six months can go by without a chicken being predated while free ranging; none of them get ill; there are no bloody battles between roosters. I’ve noticed during these times of henhouse peace that egg supply and egg demand are remarkably balanced. Our egg orders are variable as we have about 50 customers who order eggs in Boston and off our porch. The hens can lay between 20-40 dozen eggs a week. I have had straight runs of up to a dozen weeks where the exact number of eggs ordered match the number of eggs laid; but these times only coincide with a reign of henhouse peace.
4. Our peacocks are 20-months old and now forming eyes on their tail feathers. Friday morning, on the week anniversary of my father-in-law’s death, I found my first tail feather on the ground of the barn, in a place that the peacocks do not range. I have no idea how it got there; but it was directly below the water spigot, where I would not miss it. The peafowl are significant to me as a symbol of love, rain and separation.
5. And lastly, there is this strange story of a neighbor boy who had lost his mother, but found his favorite chicken had wandered over a mile to his house in the pouring rain.
Ocean Matters Executive Director Laura Parker Roerden
This summer’s cinema blockbuster Finding Dory has rightly set off alarms in the marine conservation community against an anticipated spike in blue tang sales for private aquaria, which would decimate wild coral reef populations. But there is a deeper conservation message, simmering just below the film’s surface (if you will pardon the bad pun.)
Dory poignantly suffers from memory loss, which makes it difficult for her to find her way home. Like disconnected puzzle pieces, she must use the small recollections as they surface as her compass— an aural memory of the words “Jewel of Morro Bay;” the shells her parent’s lovingly placed in the sand to point her way home; and other flashbacks along the way.
Recent studies of more pristine coral reefs far from the affects of man in the remotest corner of the Pacific poignantly point out that we, too, have suffered amnesia. It’s only in the past decade that we’ve learned just how much we’ve lost in the ocean. Our former vision of a healthy sea was, in fact, already a damaged one. Our baseline for “normal” had indeed moved.
You do not have to do this work for long to see the destruction of our oceans with your own eyes. When Ocean Matters returned to Grand Cayman in 2012 after more than a decade away, we were gobsmacked by the lack of big fish on the reef. Favorite scuba sites like the coral canyons of Eden Rock and Devil’s Grotto once replete with nearly human-sized tarpon, groupers and jewfish and shimmering with thousands of silversides at a time now offered no more than algae on coral skeletons with only the smaller coral reef fish visible.
Like Dory, who once lived on a coral reef populated by life, we arrive home to “Morro Bay” to find little more than mud and rocks. The story we are forced to tell about the ocean is one of loss. Those of us in the marine conservation community working on the problem are no fools about how difficult the task in front of us is and how important it is to offer hope as we ask others to join us onboard. We pepper these stories of loss with stories of hope that rise like islands in the long stretches of a sea of problems. We fling ourselves on these stories of hope like castaways finding land.
Our islands of hope include Marine Protected Areas, single-use plastics that have been banned, victories in reducing our carbon footprint, legislation that protects keystone species or stops nitrogen runoff, and the list goes on. We’ve organized into groups: each focusing on different problems and their solutions.
The story we are forced to tell about the ocean is one of loss.
It’s true that all of these initiatives are critical to our success. They are like operations offered to patients in triage: send this one off for legislation to reduce seismic testing; this one needs a global agreement about carbon reduction; this one requires new fishing regulation. And on and on we work. We know what must be done and done now, so we get the word out and engage others in helping us to do it. Our work is nothing if not earnest.
Like everyone in the theatre, I found myself giggling when Dory arrived at the Marine Life Institute where Sigourney Weaver’s disembodied voice announced their mission of “rescue, rehabilitation, and release.” But as I reflected after, I found myself wondering just as the movie’s guiding mantra asked, “What would Dory do?” about the daunting task in front of us to stop the destruction of our seas. And just whom, in fact, are we rescuing?
Throughout the film, Dory feels her way back to home relying on her friends and an uncanny ability to be truly in the moment, a previously unheralded gift of her disability. There is no villain in this story, but our own limitations, which can be turned on their side to be our strengths when seen with a new lens.
We hear a lot about how the ocean suffers from what is glibly called the “tragedy of the commons”—short-hand for the reality that no one nation owns international waters, promoting a winner-takes-all attitude towards it. I have always had a faintly uneasy feeling about that phrase.
What would it take to shift the paradigm in marine conservation? What would it take to truly bring others on board in a way that feels like everyone has more?
In my work with young people in Ocean Matters, we do an activity from Educators for Social Responsibility (now called Engaging Schools) where all the participants are given instructions in pairs to assume the pose of arm wrestling on a table with their partners. They are then told that for each time that one’s hand hits the table during a three-minute time period he or she will be given a Hershey’s chocolate kiss. A buzzer sounds and the participants begin.
Usually, the pairs begin arm wrestling, with little progress being made and few arms hitting tables. Somewhere one of the pair is overpowering the other and counting enthusiastically, while the other frowns. Very little kisses are distributed. Then gradually, one pair will discover a simple truth: by negotiating to cooperate rather than compete the pair can move their arms like windshield wipers, hitting the table multiple times and mounting numbers of chocolate kisses that are so plentiful they can be easily shared. Others notice the first pair strategic shift and reaping the rewards of piles of chocolate kisses, and join them. The cooperative tactic moves like a wave across the room. And everyone has more.
What would it take to shift the paradigm in marine conservation? What would it take to truly bring others on board in a way that feels like everyone has more?
Perhaps the story we should tell is not only one of loss; or a triumph of hope. Perhaps instead we should focus our narrative on connection. Our efforts to heal the ocean might feel more like a quest, as Dory’s is, to find ourselves. As environmentalist David Orr posits, “The sum total of violence wrought by people who do not know who they are, because they do not where they are is the environmental crisis.” This is a different call to action. In this call to action, we are like marriage counselors, not surgeons, helping to repair the relationships between our own selves and the ocean.
While triage is still necessary, let’s also acknowledge and seed the hope spots whose mission is to connect us back to the sea—the Blue Mind initiative, innovative visual art and poetry programs like From the Bow Seat, hands-on marine education programs like Ocean Matters, experiences like those offered by Women Working for Oceans where members create marine art, and those of Operation Surf and others who are working on stories of connection to the ocean.
Ocean Matters’ students in Hawaii enjoying a break together from their service learning project on the coral reef.
Our efforts to heal the ocean could feel more like a quest, as Dory’s is, to find ourselves.
Research confirms the importance of connection in nurturing social responsibility. Shelley Berman, author of Children’s Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsibility looked at the research on activists and found that pro-social action was “less about moral principles and more about a sense of self as connected to others and to the world as a whole.” Moreover, the studies also point to “an additional motivator of activism: a sense of meaning and a sense of place within the larger context.”
Perhaps we won’t repair the ocean because she’s broken; we’ll heal ourselves because we reunite with her, and in reuniting we will have the foundation on which to stand to save ourselves.
As Ocean Matters student Josh once wrote reflecting back on the significance of his experience working on the coral reef on a monitoring project for five weeks on scuba when he was a teenager:
“I think the ocean has a much stronger voice in my life today. Depending on the day of the week or the situation, it’s the voice of practicality, the voice of kindness. Sometimes it keeps me from doing something I might want to do. . .other times it makes me feel good about what I’m doing.”
In this story, the sea is our heart’s home. Our stories of connection to the sea can become like the shells left by Dory’s parents, a pathway to help us find our way home when we collectively lose our way or forget who we.
Each spring we increase our flock with new heritage breed chicks. This year we added all-heritage breed Buff Orpingtons and Araucanas. Buff Orpingtons, as their name implies, are buff-colored hens that lay tan eggs. Araucanas come in a array of colors, my favorite is almost cerulean; they lay different shades of blue and green eggs that suggest paint chips with earthy names like iron washed, sea salt, blue dusk. It takes the birds about five months to sexually mature and lay eggs.
We order our chicks for arrival in April and May. This past year we welcomed about 70 new chicks to our farm, keeping them in brooders that are off the ground, protected by chicken wire, and warmed by heat lamps 24/7. The brooders are separated from the grown hens by a half wall and chicken wire, so that the hens and chicks can see one another.
At about 8 weeks old, we move the chicks from their brooders into the larger coop with the mature hens. Because the hens are familiar with the chicks, and vice versa, combining the chicks with the mature hens is without the drama that other farms sometimes report.
At first the smaller birds elect to stay in the flocks they’ve been with since hatching, nesting in bedding on the ground. But gradually as the weeks wear on, they start to act like the older hens, blending in when they eat, roosting at night, and eventually by mid-summer venturing outside for small periods of time along with the bigger girls.
You can watch as the roosters introduce the younger hens to the various places around our pasture, barn yard, and farmhouse gardens where the best bits of insects and worms can be found. By the early fall, the new hens are outside all day free-ranging on our thirty acres, returning to roost with the rest of the flock at dusk.
Waiting for first eggs can feel like waiting for a pot to boil. The days shorten, the shadows lengthen. Just as darkness descends, the eggs arrive in a blast of nature’s promise of spring.
Second year hens lay larger eggs; the first year hens medium sized. And this year’s hens first eggs arrive as tiny pebble-sized eggs called pullet eggs.
Our eggs are EGG-cellent. All natural; all heritage breed hens; all free-range and pasture-raised. Free-ranged hens who are pasture raised in the fresh air and sunshine have all of the benefits of roaming healthy grassland eating as nature intended birds to eat. Their large dark orange yolks even LOOK healthier, because they are healthier. Their color, flavor and texture are made distinctive by high amounts of Vitamin A, D, E, K2, B-12, folate, riboflavin, zinc, calcium, beta carotene, choline, and tons of omega 3 fatty acids, including DHA, EPA, ALA, and AA. A pasture-raised egg is a true superfood.
Last winter, my doctor told me that I had to take Vitamin D because folks who live at our longitude do not receive adequate amounts of sunlight to maintain optimal amounts for healthy immune functioning. I insisted she do a vitamin D blood profile to find out if I did, indeed, need nutritional supplements. I think she was the only one surprised when my labs came back on the upper range of normal for Vitamin D. Even the lab report said, “Stop taking your nutritional supplements.”
When did we begin accepting that our food can not give us what our bodies’ need?
We are now able to accommodate more local egg customers. So if you’re interested, ask for details to be emailed to you in the comments below.
Any local eggs are better than the grocery store, but I think yours are better than our other local options—both in terms of humane practices and also the health benefits of them eating free range. —Monica Waugh, Jo-Erl Farm egg customer
I feel held by the fall. This thought comes to me during my morning run along the River Bend towpath, in the lee of the Voss farm, one of the six other dairy farmers in Uxbridge while I was growing up. The Voss farm is no longer a farm. It is a monument—a state park with a long trail along a river canal that now has no purpose except recreational. The canal once was the latest innovation in transportation, allowing the mills to move woolen goods towed by horses along a straight and clear path through the Blackstone Valley.
No doubt the Voss farm was built before the industrial revolution. Its barn is the same size and style as our own, which likely dates it to just pre-Civil War. Before the advent of electricity the animals would have needed the drinking water of the Rice City pond—the broad expanse of the Blackstone River upon which the farm backs up to. The barn was built where the land rises on a slight knoll overlooking the water, in respect to the regular inundations of a flood plain. Those Yankee farmers knew how to site their farms, showing deep knowledge for the rhythms of the land that created the best conditions for farming. The rich soil of a flood plain was the ideal setting for the corn and grain planted in fields still open to this day.
My attention is focused on the ground while I run, because that is where the roots and uneven earth is, but everywhere my awareness is brought to the light of autumn. It is very windy and the leaves are animated above me, casting flickering shadows on the ground that remind me of the patterns waves and sea life cast on the bottom while scuba diving. I feel held, even as I try to keep my balance on uneven terrain.
The smell of the air as I breathe in and out, now running harder, is so clean I can feel it nearly reach my feet with each long draw into my lungs. I can hear my heart beating and feel the rush of blood pulsing through my neck. And then it smacks me. I think of my brother and his last moments, as his heart stopped pounding. It’s a thought I try to avoid, but like all grief, it intrudes on the purest of moments—times when I’m not even thinking. My eyes moisten. I continue running, half crying, half held by the light, which now through my tears is making everything blur and reminding me of white sheets snapping in the breeze on a clothesline.
Fall for me has become less about the blazing color and more about a surrender to the reflected light—a half eaten communion wafer offered to us in candle light. The Voss farm is no more, devoured by the Industrial Revolution, one small bite at a time. Our farm, too, dismantled piece by piece. And so too the mills, a tow path rendered useless by the advent of the railroads, a mill in the northeast supplanted by garment districts first in the south and later in foreign lands with cheaper labor. My own brother Dave, who was here last fall laughing, haying, and drinking beer is now returned to the earth as ashes.
It happens so quickly, each turn of the kaleidoscope. It shows no mercy. As kids, we would call out “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” ending the game when the thought of one of us being truly lost in our games of hide and seek became too much to bear. But this march of time forward has no such trumpet call of mercy. There is only this sliding sheave of birth, maturity, decay, and death in spiraling cycles that are too easy for us to pretend are standing still because of their predictable repetition.
The edges of the leaves on the trees are browning and bending in the first sign of decay. Some have already given up and are taking their place among the smoldering matter on the ground. It’s a lie that I will smell this spiced residue every fall. It’s as if I am realizing that for the first time.
The Concord grapes just last month smelled swollen and sweet. But today I notice they are now rotting on the vines and sticky on the path. I stop running and bend to watch a line of ants marching from a sugary mess, bringing the life giving final energies of decay back to their nests.
This is why I like fall, I realize. It’s more honest than spring, which seems to suggest that life is an endlessly reckless party. The lines I see on my face, the changes in my body all seem to be mirrored everywhere I look. If there is a blazing beauty to it and equally stunning light it is only that more poignant when the final darkness of winter descends.
That feels right to me, even as I fight against it and strain to integrate it. If there is a redemptive moment when we leave in that final flash of light, I do not know. But I feel certain watching the sugars returned by the ants to their underground cities to feed the roots of endlessly growing and decaying trees that something of my brother remains.
The autumn light spills from a slanted sky in geometric planes. I come upon the gentle fluh-fluh-fluh sound of an impossibly enormous great blue heron taking off. A single leaf takes a circuitous route to the ground. How is it that the mad tiddlywinks game of life pressing forward appears to be fueled entirely by death and change, and yet, still somehow suggests safe passage?
