As the balding man swept his over-sized yard rake across the dead leaves that had dropped to the ground after last week’s freeze, he just as easily could have been a barber sweeping up sheared strands of hair from the barbershop floor or a butcher with a squeegee in his hand sending blood-stained water down the drain. He, like them, was dealing with debris, the cleanup from death.
Not that he gave such thought to his work. There was no evidence of a philosopher beneath his sweeping motions, no indication that he understood that the curled leaves that crunched beneath his feet had been alive the week before, that they had had life pulsing through their veins with the same energy that moves through the arteries of our own bodies. Rather, he seemed intent on doing the job that Sunday afternoon, wishing he was watching the game on TV, placing the blame on these dead leaves for his breaking the Sabbath rest.
Overhead naked tree branches swayed with the movement of the wind, ashamed to be seen without clothes and shivering in the cold like a close-cropped dog in the brisk outdoors. There were many of them—these naked sisters stretching from the trunk of the tree—and they looked at one another with sad eyes, remembering recent summer days when they were clothed in nature’s finest finery. They had little time to reconcile to their lost beauty, staring at one another and wondering when their season had passed.
Below them, the man with the rake was making a pile of their plumage much as a farmer would do with mowed grass shaped into a hay bale or a grave digger would do with dirt formed into a mound. He showed no regard for their loss nor did he hear their lamentation that was carried away on the winds that whipped in and around the barren branches. Like most people, his mind was on the next thing that he had to do before the day was done. Off to the side of the yard, an unleashed dog, with nose to ground, was sniffing the new smells of Fall. Amber-colored pumpkins stood as sentinels on the porch of the old two-story house that seemed to creak just a bit with each gust of wind.
Cars sped by on the street and some—maybe more—glanced towards the man at work. One waved at him, an apparent acquaintance, although he did not stop to help. Likely each of them had leaves in their own yards that needed raked and piled and bagged, and they wished they were as far along with the task as this man was. Theirs would have to wait until tomorrow or until next week or until the wind blew the leaves into self-made piles.
Four boys raced from the house, the oldest perhaps ten years of age, the youngest carrying four years on his miniature frame. The oldest grabbed another rake to help his dad while the youngest held a leaf-blower in his small hands. The eldest brother moved with lightning bug speed across the yard while the youngest brother tried to keep his balance with the over-sized blower that seemed to whip around in his hands like a water hose with too much pressure. Both sons seemed to see the work as less a job and more an adventure. Meanwhile, the other two boys danced across the yard, arms and legs moving to the beat of the music felt in the whirlwind. All four seemed free of gravity, more like pinballs or popcorn kernels bouncing without the pull of earth to bring them down.
Soon enough the pile of leaves had become a respectable mound and so the man put down his rake and went into the house. No doubt he was glad to have the chore done and the game still on the TV in the living room. He didn’t look back as he left the boys behind in the yard, but walked into the front door without a second thought. He thought that bagging the leaves could wait for another day or a better time.
The boys were left alone with the pile of leaves and for a while they traded the rake between them, seeing if they could make the pile tighter and higher. Every motion they took was done with ease, with energy, without effort. Youth was on their side. And because they were young and daring and still not tamed by the years, they switched from work to play in a matter of moments, with the oldest being the first to take a flying leap onto the pile of leaves, followed by his brothers, one by one, with the youngest backing up from the pile the most distance, as if he were an athlete about to compete at the high jump bar. None of them had weight enough on their bodies to smash the pile or to scatter the leaves much beyond the boundary already made for them.
I watched with interest and perhaps with envy as the boys took turns with their flips and dives and jumps into the pile of dead leaves, each in an unspoken competition with their somersaults, although it was not clear to me what any imagined scoring might be based upon. There was no deliberateness as they took their turns on this trampoline of leaves, just abandonment to the moment, which is the purity of play and the prerogative of the playful. I noticed that each boy would wipe away any leaves that clung to his clothes, no doubt their brittle edges biting into the tender flesh beneath their turned-up shirttails.
As I watched, I knew that the boys did not see what I saw—that they were jumping on a pyre of corpses and that they were having the time of their life at a funeral. It would take years and the bad breaks that always accompany the passage of time before they would understand the many signs that warn us winter is coming. For now, they still believed days are not numbered and bodies do not fail. No, they were blessed with the illusion and the ignorance that time stands still and the seasons do not switch.
Later in the day, I walked into my own yard and I looked at the withered plants and the wasted away flowers. The grass was no longer green and the leaves on my trees fell upon the ground with each blast of wind. Last week, they were full of color and filled with life. Today they are unrecognizable, as if they vanished somewhere overnight and faceless strangers now take their place, as did changelings who overnight replaced children in ancient lore. I understood what the woman with wrinkles meant when she explained why she had surgery done to remove the signs of aging from her face. She said, “I just wanted to see me again in the mirror.”
Of course, none of this is new. It is as old as the lifespan of humanity, set as we are in space and in time, our planet whirling in orbit, the seasons passing one after another, our lives on a trajectory towards the cold freeze of winter. Job who came to understand most everything but God would say, “Like a flower man comes forth, and then withers away.” Later, the same sentiment would be voiced by a Christian writer in his holy texts when he wrote, “All flesh is as grass and all the glory of man like the flower of the grass. The grass withers and its flower falls away.”
In much the same way, the saintly man Benedict of Nursia instructed his monks to learn well the surest lesson that life teaches us. He tells them that they must “always keep death daily before their eyes.” Some, of course, took it literally, as we can see in the so-called “Chapel of Bones” built in the 16th century in Evora, Portugal, where stacks of human skulls and other bare bones of some five thousand corpses are encased in the walls of the chapel, stacked to the roof like a pile of dead leaves from the autumn frost. Above the chapel doors we read this warning: “We bones are here waiting for you.”
Long before that chapel of skulls was built, Imperial Rome found a way to teach the same truth that all things change. As a victorious general would be heralded in the parade of triumph through the streets of Rome, with his captives in chains behind him, a person was assigned to whisper into the ear of the gloating general, “Memento mori” — remember you have to die. Perhaps it is from here that the Christians would borrow their Ash Wednesday ritual with similar words, “Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”
A writer whose name I do not recall but whose words I more or less remember once said that every old man becomes a philosopher. I am at an age where I believe it is true. If nothing else, it seems to be the trade off that comes with the piled up years. As the outer vision becomes clouded, the inner vision becomes clearer. Not for all, for sure, but for those who have pulled wisdom from experience much the same as feathers are plucked from a dead chicken.
As I considered again the day behind me and the lesson that the leaves of the tree left for me, I wonder if maybe those four young boys did not have the right idea, even if it was not a deliberate one. Should we also not find what joy we can in the day? Or better said by Thoreau, the philosopher-in-residence at Walden Pond, should we not “want to live deep and to suck out all the marrow of life” while our mouths still can open?
So, again, this last thought. Underneath all the rivalry and the treachery of the popular TV show, “Game of Thrones,” there remained always the essential truth of life as we humans know it. That truth is found in the motto of the House of Stark, “Winter is coming.” And while the surface meaning is clear enough in this warning to the people of the North whose lands would suffer the greatest from winter–like Dakotans on our own frontiers–we do not want to miss the greater meaning–that none of us will be spared the “winter of our discontent.” Winter comes to all vigorous humans as surely as it comes to all vibrant leaves on the tree. The certainty that it comes tomorrow tells us to jump high on the pile of leaves today.
—Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 