It’s August and things are turning brown. I guess that means death. I know I have buried our vacations, with the memories stored on my phone never to be printed. There are too many photo albums in attics for me to feel bad about it, but sometimes I wonder…
If there was a way to capture the past and the chubby baby fingers and funny childish sayings, would i do it? Would I preserve them? Its something to consider as the fruit falls to the ground.
There’s that famous goose with the golden eggs, riches galore, a new egg waiting every day. But first night. The manna of life, the moment with a child before they grow another inch, the smell of fall in the air, invisible and yet present, our gift for today. When we rush to keep it for tomorrow we hit our head against cautionary poultry.
There is death in greed that’s everlasting, but there’s a new egg every morning when you leave the bird, take the egg, and suffer through darkness a little while until the sun rises.
I’m learning not to be afraid of the dark, because I am learning to believe in sunrises. I’m interested in deaths that bring a new spring, a new golden egg, a new season of peaches. I’m not interested in the frozen she-wolf deaths that come from storing things away for mold and moth. There’s a difference.
Now the freestone are falling. For us it means bowls of peaches until you can hardly stand them anymore. Manna is like that. My mother grows Fay Elberta peaches on the farm, but they bruise too easily to really be featured in stores. It’s a type of golden goose in fruit form, easily bruised if you try to save it for the future. The same goes for white nectarines, the second you pick them you need to stick them in your mouth or they’re rotting on your counter. These are the delicate fruits I serve over poetry readings and math assignments. I try to preserve in my own ways, I scatter seeds to the wind, I tend.
As August fades, the peaches soften and rot. I cannot save them but I try with the power of deep freezers. They’re just not the same frozen. Yes, it’s a peach in December, but it’s really just a memory of a peach in August coated with sugar. There’s a taste of a lie to them, a faded memory that doesn’t remember the whole truth. Maybe it’s better than nothing but it doesn’t compare to the real thing.
This is why I am happy to let things go. I like it when stories have endings. I like the season changing because I know the peaches of tomorrow are so much tastier than the ones you store in a freezer. I believe in golden geese and bread from heaven.
My Great Aunt died last week. She was 105. She was part of a family of ten. She used to babysit me, and her grand, green old house had a claw foot tub and a basement. It terrified me but I loved it, there were oil paintings and swinging doors. She made soup with lots of vegetables but it felt important to at least drink the broth without a huge fuss, because there were cloth napkins. The basement had a lot of old books, and an organ, and some terrifying old baby dolls I found fascinating. She had a garden, and an orange tree outside her kitchen, and a very loud laugh. In the end she didn’t have any of those things, not even the 10 siblings.
I try to walk the fine line of goodbyes, of harvests, without greed. The greed kills the goose, it makes real things false, it clings to the past instead of gathering and letting things lie, waiting for the next warm summer when there are peaches dropping and everyone is tired of them.
Maybe this is important to me because I have reached the middle, the age where you notice the beginning of…becoming ripe. I’m suddenly very interested in what I should hold on to, and what I should let go. I am suddenly very interested in how to preserve things, and should I. Things have been buried. I am losing Aunts and Dreams and my hair is turning grey. I wonder if I am losing, or gaining. Maybe it means the same thing, if you let it. I notice I am starting to feel an ache for something I used to know. There was an orange tree, and an old lady who laughed…
My Great Aunt, the one who used to have a claw foot tub and a basement full of books, the one who had cloth napkins, and poked my boys with her cane for fun? The last words she said were, “Ready or not, here I come.”
A goodbye is a hello after a long night, the gold at sunrise, the gold in the trees. So we can choose to lose it all and wait with hope for the real thing or lose it all and chase the memories and the fake tomatoes in January.
What a tribute. And reminder. Teach us to number our days, not so we can gather and spend them, but so we can learn wisdom. I think you’re on the right path!