back of the pickup 1994 — only yesterday but another lifetime ago
And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup,leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding fast…
Whatever I saw
I had already passed…
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)
~Jane Kenyon from “What It’s Like”
Moving forward, looking back at what is already passed.
Our children begin coming home today for their summer visits….
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
At the soft place in the snowbank
Warmed to dripping by the sun
There is the smell of water.
On the western wind the hint of glacier.
A cottonwood tree warmed by the same sun
On the same day,
My back against its rough bark
Same west wind mild in my face.
A piece of spring
Pierced me with love for this empty place
Where a prairie creek runs
Under its cover of clear ice
And the sound it makes,
Mysterious as a heartbeat,
New as a lamb.
~Tom Hennen from “In the Late Season”
And so, pierced by love, we begin the melt, readying for what is to come. The thaw shatters us into pieces, no longer iced up and untouched. A current of hopefulness now flows freely in deeply buried veins, warmed and pulsing.
Our hearts thrum. All will be new.
photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten
I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair
I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see
For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green
I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know
But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
Sara Teasdale–September Midnight
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”
Reading Hopkins invokes God’s intentional accessibility “stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet” in our daily lives, if we simply open our eyes to see and ears to hear. The details Hopkins captures in marvelous word pictures, painting with sound and syllable, pull us in. The “heart rears wings” as we are lifted up to see the Lord manifest in Creation. We can’t help but be harvested to live obediently as we “glean our Savior” through raised heart and eyes to the glory in the heavens.
As Kathleen Mulhern in her blog “Dry Bones” says in her analysis of “a Christ sighting”:
“There is no point in seeing without responding; there is no way to respond without seeing. Christian life and practice require both faith (the sight of the heart) and works (the lurch of the heart toward him in obedience).”
The gleaning of our Savior is particularly manifest in the sacrament of communion, the earthly meal Jesus invites us to partake of His harvest. In the bread and wine, “a barbarous beauty” representing his body and blood, He lifts us up to taste the glories of heaven.
Our heart “hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him” in response.
What else, at summer’s end, can we do?
We walk in faith, raised up, glorious.
And somehow Hallie thrived anyway–the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.
~Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams
There is a plum tree on our farm that is so plain and unassuming most of the year that I nearly forget that it is there. It is a bit off by itself away from the other fruit trees; I have to make a point of paying attention to it otherwise it just blends into the scenery.
Despite not being noticed or having any special care, this tree thrives. In the spring it is one of the first to bud out into a cloud of white blossoms with a faint sweet scent. Every summer it is a coin toss whether it will decide to bear fruit or not. Some years–not at all, not a single plum. Other years, like this one, it is positively glowing with plum harvest– each a golden oval with a pink blush. These plums are extraordinarily honey flavored and juicy, a pleasure to eat right off the tree if you don’t mind getting past a bitter skin and an even more bitter pit inside. This is a beauty with a bite. I think the tree secretly grins when it sees puckering taking place all around it.
This tree is a lot like some people I know: most of the time barely noticeable, hanging on the periphery, fairly reserved and unobtrusive. But when roots go deep and the nourishment is substantial, they bear fruit, no doing things half-way. The feast is plentiful and abundant, the meal glorious despite the hint of sour. Maybe it is even more glorious because of the hint of sour.
If “tucker” describes a great down-home meal, then being “plum tuckered” sounds positively wonderful.
But I suspect plum tuckered is really about what happens after picking and preserving hundreds of these radiant gems.
It’s time for bed. I’m both kinds of plum tuckered.
Autumn begins to be inferred
By millinery of the cloud,
Or deeper color in the shawl
That wraps the everlasting hill.
~Emily Dickinson in “Summer Begins to Have the Look”
Summer is waning and wistful; it has the look of packing up, and moving on without bidding adieu or looking back over its shoulder. Cooling winds have carried in darkening clouds with a hint of spit from the sky as I gaze upward to see (and smell) the change. Rain is long overdue yet there is temptation to bargain for a little more time. Though we are in need of a good drenching there are still onions and potatoes to pull from the ground, berries to pick before they mold on the vine, tomatoes not yet ripened, corn cobs just too skinny to pick. I’m just not ready to wave goodbye to sun-soaked clear skies.
The overhead overcast is heavily burdened with clues of what is coming: earlier dusk, the feel of moisture, the deepening graying hues, the briskness of breezes. There is no negotiation possible. I need to steel myself and get ready, wrapping myself in the soft shawl of inevitability.
So autumn advances with the clouds, taking up residence where summer has left off. Though there is still clean up of the overabundance left behind, autumn will bring its own unique plans for display of a delicious palette of hues.
The truth is we’ve seen nothing yet.
a September dawn on the farm
our haywagon swallowed by this year’s growth of blackberry bushes
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries~
–Elizabeth Barrett Browning in “Aurora Leigh”
All I wanted was a few blackberries.
I admit my objective was just to pick enough for cobbler for Sunday noon dinner after church, oblivious to God burning in the bushes towering over me, around me, snagging me at every opportunity. If I had given it more thought, I would have realized the reaching vines hooking my arms and legs were hardly subtle. The thorns ripped at my skin, leaving me bloody and smarting. The fruit itself stained my hands purple, making them look freshly bruised. I crushed fat vines underfoot, trampling and stomping with my muck boots in order to dive deeper into the bushes. Webs were everywhere, with spiders crawling up my arms and dropping down into my hair. I managed to kick up one hornet’s nest so I called it quits.
All I wanted was a few blackberries, so blinded to all the clues crammed in every nook and cranny of every bush.
All I wanted was a few blackberries, trampling on holy ground with well-protected feet, unwilling to be barefoot and tenderly vulnerable.
All I wanted was a few blackberries, the lure of black gold plucked at the cost of rips and scratches and tears.
What I got was burned by a bush…
and a few blackberries for tomorrow’s crammed-with-heaven cobbler.
photo by Josh Scholten
Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know…
Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening.
~Wendell Berry in “Ripening”
My husband and I walk our country road together on a warm late summer evening, breathing in the smell of ripening cornstalks and freshly mowed grass lined up in windrows, much like the walks we took together nearly thirty years ago when we were newly married. Just down the road, we pass the smaller farm we first owned having left the city behind for a new life amid quieter surroundings. The seedling trees we planted there are now a thick grove and effective windbreak from the bitter howling northeasters we endured. The fences need work after 25 years, the blackberries have swallowed up the small barn where our first horses, goats, chickens and cows lived, the house needs painting, nevertheless there is such sweetness recalling the first home we owned together.
On this road, our children were conceived and raised, strolling these same steps with us many times, but now flown thousands of miles away for their life’s work. My husband and I are back to walking together again, just the two of us, wondering how each child is doing at this very moment, pondering how the passage of time could be so swift that our hair is turning white and we are going to seed when only yesterday we were so young.
We ripen before we’re ready.
It is bitter sweetness relinquishing what we know, to face what we can never know.
It is the mystery that keeps us coming back, walking the same steps those younger legs once did, admiring the same setting sun, smelling the same late summer smells. But we are not the same as we were, having finally come to the fruitfulness intended all along.
Ripening and readying.
photo by Josh Scholten
Tony running in the lower field
“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James
Front yard light and shadow under the walnut tree
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
~John Lubbock
haybarn
2012 Hay Storage
It will not always be summer; build barns.
~Hesiod
tree house in the walnut tree
front porch
Jose, who owns the front porch
Old buddies Dylan Thomas and Bobbie
Samwise Gamgee at 18 weeks
Thistle making more thistle
Gravenstein windfalls
a few of a million blackberries on the farm
silver plum tree
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
~ Harper Lee in Too Kill a Mockingbird
‘Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Thomas More
poplar row
in the filbert grove
heavy cone crop
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
milking barn window
from the field
old milk barn
barn lane
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
~William Shakespeare
hydrangea
