Been thinkin’ about…Dark spring earth

The orange streetlamps lit a covey of maple trees, trees whose leaves were making weird shivery noises in the early nighttime darkness. The sound was almost that of the ocean surf in the new dark of yet another Saturday, another week, another deep fall night, another onrushing winter, another year cold and soon dead. I stood on the high cement parking deck, modern American convention hotel juxtaposed with another old neighborhood. The orange light cast weird shadows over trash cans and old garages, weathered siding and at least one wayward cat sniffing, watching from an old gravel-rock alley. I do appreciate how the mundane — real life — always somehow remains, grounding us, reminding us, humbling us. No matter how grand the big urban planners might be, no matter how comprehensive the fancy branding, life and trash and feral cats and worn out alleys and beat-up garages remain.

An hour’s drive back home and the shivery wind continues, blowing in a real cold front this time. The poplar leaves across the street simply wave to and fro, casting weird shadows that appear to race across the ground. The air is warm yet, the last full breath of summer, and it was a long, hot summer too. I remember stumbling home from many farmers markets, four, five, six, seven hours in the heat, wondering when the spell would break. Tonight, the spell is breaking, and a new one cast. Tomorrow night, there will be frost and clear, cold skies and the neighborhood will smell of wood smoke as more than one person fires up their fireplace or wood stove to stave off winter, if even only for a morning. But tonight, the air is warm, even soft in the shivering gusts. Clouds above cast over a wide moon that continues to wane. Halloween is done. No matter what they say, however, the darker season is not done, but is instead, just beginning. The breeze has that earthy, airy smell of leaves as they decay, a luminous scent in the deep, herald of things ending, again.

With all the lights and seasonal festivities, it’s easy to trick our minds out of the simple, harsh realities. Seasons — like all things — die. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes we have warning, sometimes none at all. And no matter how we pretty things up, there is grief in the dying. I recognize the pointlessness of euphemism, even as I employ such things: passing on, no longer here, transitioned, gone home. There is instead simple beauty in the harsh: Dead. Dead and gone. The Ozarks were once a place where we shot straight, said the things that were, not the things we pretended them to be. False good tidings were a place of luxury, of modernity, lies made pretty and we wonder why anxiety consumes us. Far better to face the end of things with heads held high, honesty of the thing in our hearts, even as we grieve a loss.

The smell in the night is the death of the season, the death of this season’s tree leaves. But there is lightness and hope, even in the dark. Not from avoiding the truth, the ending of the thing, the loss, but accepting it, even bowing to it, realizing we — for all our intellect (if you can call it that), or our technology — are not that much different or less affected than the trees blowing in the wind, or alley cats prowling the dark, or squirrels hunkered down in their leaf nests tonight. We might be called to dominion over creation of sorts, but we are also flesh and blood. We are creation too, and not so high and mighty after all, not here, not in the dark. And maybe that’s why some fear the night, and others do not.

The waning moon appears again overhead. The dry leaves shiver. And the smell in the night is not unlike that of the smell of the fresh soil of the dark springtime earth, full of dark and mystery but also life, life and hope of another season, another chance, another beginning. For that’s what the seasons are all about — nothing but death in life, endings and beginnings again. I pause for a moment, watching the soft leaves fall to the earth beneath the orange light of the streetlamp, watching again, one last time.