I awoke and found the land changed; the view morphed. The house being built next to ours seems to have sprung up overnight and now we are surrounded. The land in reluctance has surrendered another plot and I assume the soil questions the ‘gifting’ of itself.
I rose and in the day’s journey I dusted the buffet belonging to my Grandmother; a piece of furniture more than one hundred years old and I wondered what this piece of lovely wood has witnessed. Wood and land, dust and soil and stone; watching humanity move and build and tear down and stomp around with passions and proclamations. They wait without comment for they were on the very tip of God’s hand during creation and they will cover us as God closes eyes and they observe our lives and decisions…and they wonder as we dust and dig and carry on with abandon…
I drove home on a lonely back road this afternoon. Had I not driven this way, I would have missed an encirclement of magnificent color. I rode through vast carpeted hills stuffed full with vermilion maples, golden oaks and rows of ruby and orange-rose sumac and smaller bushes nestled tightly like fat, satisfied bugs along the edges of stripped and harvested fields; the rainy air drenching everything in waves of umber and lemon wash, crimson leaves, apricot and peach curlings and orange and salmon brush.
I opened the car window and it smelled of pumpkins and Cortland apples and hay and mealy earth. Over the road width hung a light curtain, a stretched and elegant grey gauzey fog. The plowed fields were dark red and the road wound this way and that with nothing in sight save an Amish farm with a cart and horse and children playing before twilight
Driving the back road is risky; not one to be attempted once the sun has set. I slowed a bit, moving forward cautiously and then witnessed two deer. One larger, one smaller appeared suddenly with light trotting steps and they leapt gracefully across the road, jumping down into the gully on the left; a flash of white tail and they were gone in the foliage. They do not trust the road.
Had I not driven this lonely patch I would have missed the large white slab of cement; the end of an old barn jutting onto the edge of the front yard of an Amish home. I would have missed the two children darting and jumping. There was a thin blue-garbed girl with a white bonnet, wearing roller skates and spinning around in circles on the white surface. She played keep away from a younger child; a small boy who was dressed in a brown suit, matching brown hat and barefoot. He chased her gleefully with a stick; wobbling on his chubby feet as she skated away. They disappeared in a swirl of leaves and they were gone in my rear view mirror. They did not look my way. They do not trust the road.
The deer, our new neighbors, the children and I are on the same road; although strangers to each other. We wander, skate and wobble forward in a swirl of magnificent color, meeting only for a very brief moment under a darkening sky on a path we have reason to consider carefully, but within the care of the Creator who shakes the globe and mixes up the autumnal paints and lets the lemon brush fall where it may. There would have been no risk taking the direct way home, but with risk comes the richness of meandering and the rust of old skates and a russet rain over the hills where I nurture my sense of place.
690 Saint Paul 