Changing seasons

Just one of the great joys of E.B. White's classic personal narrative, "Once more to the Woods," is this sense he feels, returning to his childhood haunts at the cabin, that no time has passed. It's overwhelming with him, and nearly blinds him, until that last famous line, to the sobering (that's understatement) fact that time hasn't stood still and that his own mortality is very real.  

I felt something of that this morning, when, lying awake in bed in a familiar cabin, I looked up at the window curtain and seemed to remember so vividly being here before (and before and before and before) and was struck by the illusion that I hadn't left this place 12 months ago now, hadn't started a new school year, hadn't traveled to New Mexico to scout out options, hadn't played with my grandchildren, hadn't visited our folks, hadn't witnessed a new football team at a school I've been at for more than thirty years.

I'm sitting at a table where, to my left, a gorgeous northern Minnesota lake is rippling with a soft wind and growing more silvery since the sun has now finally determined to move up. It's like no time has past.

But it has.

My mother watched her car drive away yesterday. My niece, who retrieved it from the home where Mom lives, told us that Mom had to come outside to watch, partially because that car carries some memories of her life with the man who bought it, several years ago, memories that didn't leave with the Buick, but somehow were as much a part of that car as its engine, its transmission.

But there's more. That Buick is a symbol, whether it's in her parking spot at the home or in our driveway--where it will be soon--500 miles west. That car is a symbol of her ever-shrinking mobility, of the ever-decreasing size of the radius of her own life. She can't get in and go anymore--and she shouldn't. 

It was the right decision, getting rid of it--all her children agreed and even she did. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't understand painfully that when it left the oval driveway in front of the Home, when it went down the street and left her vision, that it wouldn't be back. The tether that keeps her there, at the Home, is now far shorter than it was, even though she didn't take that Buick any farther than a half mile to a grocery store.

The car is gone. She's more dependent on others now for some things she considers necessities, and her world has grown infinitely smaller.

Somehow, her son, I can feel at least some of that pain; and I feel it the same way E. B. White felt it when he watched his son pull on those wet shorts and felt nothing less than mortality tightening its grip on his own vital self.

The fact is, sadly, time has passed since the last early, dark morning I woke up here in a sweet little cabin in northern Minnesota. My perceptions lied to me, as did White's. Life itself has stretched itself between those early mornings.

And I am as mortal as he was.

All of that may well amount to an even greater reason for me to enjoy the morning, the fall colors all around, the lake, which now has a chop in a wind that's picked up.

The oaks, I discovered this morning, have already shed most of their bright red leaves. But the ones that I see, still clinging or there on the floor of the woods--I'll try to treasure, I promise, this morning, even more.

_________________ 

Fifteen years old, this one. Mom's been gone for a half-dozen years. But this morning, 15 years later, just thought I'd say we're off to northern Minnesota. Again.