Fall Is Never Far

The older I get, the quicker the days pass.  Summer was a wild endless dream when I was younger, now I blink and it's already autumn again.  All the memories are there, they come flooding back with the first cool morning and the first smell of wild rose verbena take me back down those wooded trails from the bus stop up the hill to our farm.

I remember those days as bitter sweet.  The taste of freedom faded a little more with each passing day and we, my brother and I, only found ourselves remembering again as we stepped off the bus.  School was all equations and diagrams, nothing tangible, nothing real, but once those orange bus doors creaked opened, we darted down the ditch, flung backpacks over the barbed-wire fence, hoisted ourselves up and over too and we were back to the real world of woods filled trees to climb and muddy banks strewn with pebbles for skipping across the pond.

We trudged through the creek, or jumped across on rocks if the water was cold, maybe stopped to see a sun perch caught in a low pool, waiting for the next rain shower to send him on his way, grab a couple of persimmons to nibble on the way, and then up, up, up the hill to home where we were welcomed by cats and dogs and the sounds cows in the field ready for their dinner too.

Even though my school days are long since gone, each year as summer ends, the feelings and memories return.  They make me happy and sad all at once, and I find that I have to go back to the woods feel peace again.  When my children were little, I took them to the woods with me each turn of the summer season.  I'd take them by the hands and off we'd go to whatever little wilderness we could find.  

It wasn't always easy to find the wild.  Once, while we were living in the city, we found an empty lot in our neighborhood.  It was fully overgrown on all sides, but in the very center it was clear and we could spread out a blanket and look at the sky and listen to the sounds of insects and birds and feel lonely and quiet together.  Once we wandered through an empty park, off the trail to where the wild blackberries grew.  We ate and picked and talked for hours, just us and our dreams and the autumn winds blowing in.

I'm no longer a young mother with little children holding my hands.  My children are grown up or nearly so, with busy lives of their own.  The autumn and the woods don't call to them the way they do for me, not yet anyway.  And so, while they are caught up in planning their school year of their future now that school is done, I must go back to the woods.  Not here, on my farm where spoiled neighbors have ruined things for now, but back to the places I went when I was a girl.

I drive early in the morning, before the world is awake, to the old places I roamed that haven't changed with the rest of the world, and I sit in the noisy silence of nature, soaking in the busy peacefulness all around me as summer goes to sleep and autumn awakes once more. 

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