Of Little Girls and Perfect Days

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

Robert Frost, Gathering Leaves

Violins of Autumn sobbing
Deep and lone,
Pierced my heart is with their throbbing
Monotone.
Fierce and quick the breath, and choking,
When at last
Sounds the hour, and I recall
The happy past.
With the truant wind that brought me
I must go,
Hither, thither, as this dead leaf
Whirls below.

Paul Verlaine, In Autumn

It is autumn within the elastic borders of Humptulips County, especially in its farthest reaches, especially in the suburbs of Boston where Helen and I spent our weekend with our granddaughters, son and daughter-in-law.  Maple leaves fall to the ground there by the yardful at this time of year, even as the watching trees harbor yet more leaves to be dropped after a full day of raking, gathering and bagging leaves has ended.  These remaining leaves represent the promise of more joy to come both in this present autumn and those in the cycles of seasons yet to come.

It is, of course, a time-worn clich to compare autumn with the later stages of a life, but, as with many cliché, it has a force which becomes stronger and richer with meaning with each passing year.  For, as I watched my granddaughters this past Sunday, memories of kicking fallen leaves along the childhood streets of an eastern Washington town warmed my heart, memories fostered by the sight of my granddaughters at play – granddaughters assisted in their play by two generations of adults working assiduously to clear a back yard of a great quantity of fallen leaves, granddaughters assisted in their play by these now-former children celebrating with a vicarious joy what it once meant to be supple and carefree by the constant forming and re-forming of the huge mound of leaves into which my granddaughters played with abandon.

Sunday was a perfect day, for there was great satisfaction in watching the little girls diving and swimming in, and erupting from, the leaf pile with the glee of dolphins at play.  For it was not a day of digital isolation, but an analog day spent in the outdoors.  An autumn day like so many of those now consigned to the long-tailed past; autumn days enjoyed when we were children and our parents were adults; autumn days enjoyed when our parents were children and their parents watched with delight, and so on down the eons of the human past.

For with age comes an understanding of the communal value of shared joys and comforts, an understanding expressed by means of gentle bemusement and the resulting willingness to become complicit in sharing these joys and comforts with a new generation.  There is no better way to spend an autumn day, no better way than to assist in the strewing of such memories along your wake.

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