At Random for November 6, 2009
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Although poets often paint autumn as a time of closure and death, I’ve always thought of the season as a chance for new beginnings. The crisp air and clarified landscape suggest a clean slate and the opportunity for new dreams and fresh resolve.
The French apparently feel the same way. National Public Radio recently reported on the Parisian tradition of “la rentree,” a time when residents of the City of Light return from summer vacations to restart Paris for the fall.
“La rentree in September is a lot like the New Year in January,” a Parisian told NPR. “A lot of people make resolutions and make a new start.”
I’ve made my own resolution for autumn as Halloween fades in the rearview mirror and Thanksgiving beckons on the horizon. I’m resolving to savor the season itself, a small miracle easily overlooked in the rush of errands and appointments, meetings and traffic, daily chores and other distractions large and small.
This came to mind as my wife cleared the last of our summer zinnias from a flower bed near the porch. I can’t spot a zinnia without thinking of my Grandfather Heitman, who died long before I was born, but who’s known in family lore for the zinnias he tended on a Depression-era subsistence farm.
He had a wife, 10 children, a farm, the hundred worries that went with them. Even so, amid the plowing and mending and growing and selling, my grandfather set aside a few moments to plant some flowers for his own pleasure.
Among the many conceits of my generation is the idea that we’re the busiest folks of all, that stress is a thoroughly modern invention. But the thought of my grandfather, faced with so many mouths to feed and a farm that claimed so many hours from dawn to dusk, reminds me that the urgencies of work and fatherhood existed long before me, long before him — in fact, long before my grandfather’s grandfather.
What my grandfather seemed to grasp, and what I too often forget, is the basic wisdom of finding a few private moments in the whirr of the calendar to see what is beautiful and good.
For some weeks now, I’ve been under the spell of “Yellowstone Autumn,” author W.D. Wetherell’s account of a pilgrimage he made to Yellowstone National Park to mark his 55th birthday. Wetherell has found, with middle age, a diminishing sense of the wonder that once came naturally in youth. Such wonder, says Wetherell, needs more active cultivation as we confront the competing pressures of midlife’s demands.
‘Somewhere along the way, somewhere in the course of daily living, the steady incrustation of responsibility, this ability to just sit and watch and wonder had become atrophied, even in me, a writer, someone who is paid to keep his eye fixed on marvels of every kind,” Wetherell writes.
But such wonder is the true source of autumn’s magic, if only we’ll take the time to notice.
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