A new season
The canoe gets heavier every year. My wife and I carried it in last weekend as we did some of the chores we must do each year before the snow flies. And each year when we haul the canoe, rake the yard and climb the ladder to staple the plastic sheeting over the screens, the muscles we call upon seem a little more resistant to these tasks.
We have mixed feelings about this brief time when showy October darkens into November. Shorter days and cold crisp nights announce the long season in which the sun glares down without warmth. Our stiff muscles remind us that although the year is cyclical, our life’s journey, the physical aspect of it at least, is an arc. On this arc we are on the downside, beyond mature strength. And yet it is still exhilarating to get the chores done, to see the bed of maple leaves in the back yard become a mountain range at the edge of the street out front.
For people like me who do little physical labor, there is also a pleasant mode of thinking that occurs during fall chores. Some of it is temporal and practical, a silent conversation in which brain warns body to bend at the knees before lifting or to lean slowly and carefully to press the leaves into trashcans. But the mind wanders, too, seeing Millet’s gleaners and Van Gogh’s sowers – real laborers in their timeless dignity. Or thinking that it is election time, a telling moment in another kind of cycle, and that every other year the two cycles – fall chores and elections – occur at the same time. Sometimes, though not this year, some candidate comes knocking at the front door while we are out back, knee-deep in the leaves.
Of course, the political cycle bears little resemblance to the actual seasons. The leaves fall every year, and the view into northern woods grows deeper and more revealing each early November day. Election Day is less predictable. Faraway events have canceled the Republican swagger of recent campaigns, and today Democrats go to the polls with a wary optimism. But no one really knows what the voters will do.
Whatever the outcome of this human drama, it will not stay winter’s hand. The leaves are raked and blowing in the street. The canoe is in, and the pond, still a mirror on Sunday, will soon whiten with ice then snow. The oil truck will drone out front, a frequent but unwelcome visitor.
If I sound down about all this, I don’t mean to. Northern New England is two places, and both have their pleasures. The one dawning now may seem to be one to survive rather than to embrace, but I don’t see it that way. Survival means embracing each season as well as the less comforting curve of life.
