The Edge of Darkness

Last weekend, I spent a few days in my grandmother’s garden. I peeled the bark off of the birch trees and I had to wear a jacket because autumn came quickly up north. The cool breeze infiltrated my damn-yankee blood. I wasn’t used to such crispness.

Now, it is morning in Virginia and I see a fortress of poplar trees, still green. Just a few leaves have begun to turn to yellow. The cicadas sing one last symphony, for they know that their days are numbered.

In just a few weeks, at the beginning of October, the breeze will bring more than a 70 degree wind. It will be cold enough to wear a cardigan most days and you might even want to place an extra blanket on your bed at night.

There’s something magical about waiting for autumn to come.

I think that we so often neglect to see our attachment to the natural world. The seasons reflect our stages of life. We need winter to hibernate a bit, to embrace death for a while, to remember mortality. Spring comes and we stand on the edge of lightness, we know that there is hope and winter does not last forever. Summer comes and we are alive again, we feel in touch with our youth. But then once again, we greet autumn. We stand on the edge of darkness, remembering the innocence of our summer, while preparing ourselves for the mortality that we will soon face. I get excited about autumn the way that most people feel when they are falling in love.

The garden on the other side of the house that once produced crops and abundant summer meals with butternut squash, corn, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, beans, and zinnias, is also preparing for its last harvest. Instead of rows of vegetables, we find lima beans and the beginnings of gourds. This morning, two peppers hung on the vine that once produced twenty.

The thing about autumn, or falling in love, is that it’s really inconvenient. You no longer can be selfish like you were in the summer, taking the vegetables for granted. You have to prepare for a winter, you have to save up and can some of your harvest, place the bulbous red tomatoes inside of a clear mason jar. Instead of a ripe bounty, you see a row of silver lids in your pantry. Just like when you really begin to care for another person, you have to lay the foundation for a solid relationship. You have to think about the future.

When you are standing on the edge of darkness, waiting for the leaves to change, looking at the last bits of life around you, you are vulnerable, just like the earth. The grass dies off a bit, to make way for the snow, just like we have to let our egos die off a bit before we can let someone else in.

The art of falling in love is a difficult one to master. It takes letting down your walls, giving your vulnerabilities to someone else, and being willing to accept even their ugliest parts.

I wonder what the trees think just before they have to shed their leaves. Standing confident with their lush greenery, they must be afraid of what’s going to happen next. As the chlorophyll depletes in their cell walls, they expose themselves fully. They let their guards down. As their leaves turn from green to red, gold, and orange, it’s like nature allows us to fall deeply in love with it, once again.

Tomorrow is the autumnal equinox. In Pennsylvania it feels like autumn has already started, but it the south, the love affair will soon begin. 

Home Sweet Home

When I think of it, I can still hear the leaves crunching under my feet. I grew up in Ellwood City, a small town in Western Pennsylvania about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh. My grandparents raised me and we lived a small neighborhood called Ewing Park, which consisted of square blocks lined with two story houses that had been built for the steel workers who were employed at the tube mill.

During the steel boom, two and three bedroom houses with shutters were erected as quickly as a grandmother might make cut-out cookies during a December baking fest. The side streets: Wood St., Foch St., Pershing St., Petain St, all named after generals in the Revolutionary war, were lined with maple trees. In the fall, their orange and yellow leaves would coat the uneven sidewalk. If you were lucky, one would stick to the bottom of your shoe and you couldn’t help but take a few extra moments to admire the deep veins, the smoothness of the leaf, and then remember why this was your favorite season.

The main street in the Park, Jefferson St, was lined with sycamore trees. Walking to the football field for a Friday night game meant that you had to cross over piles of bark, that peeled off of the trees and fell like a pile of curls onto the ground.

In Ellwood, autumn came quickly. September meant that you needed to wear a jacket to school in the mornings. You would be lucky if it reached 75 degrees again before May.

September was also bulb-planting season. My grandfather would plow the garden, loosening the soil and removing any leftover pansies or petunias from the spring. Each year he would extend his flowerbed by a few inches, walking around the circular garden with his hoe, making just a little more room for the flowers my grandmother and I would plant. Looking back at old pictures, one can see the progression of the flowerbed. It went from having a 4 ft. diameter when I was three, to something like an 8 ft. diameter now that I am twenty-five.

As he embellished the size of the flowerbed, he would also embellish the number of bulbs that we would plant.  If we had 30 bulbs, he would call his friends and tell them that we planted 80. If we had 50, he would say 200. Over the past few years, as his health has declined and a combination of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s has prevented him from extending the size of his garden, he would tell of the 500 bulbs that were planted in the back yard.

“Ash- your grandmother planted over 300 of those beautiful red tulips, they’re the same color as the shed. She even did a couple hundred of those tiger lilies that you like, too,” he’d say, even though he hasn’t been well enough to walk into the garden for more than two years.

When I was growing up, he would call me onto the porch so that I could catch a glimpse at the cardinals who made a home in the lilac bush, after all of the leaves had fallen and the aromatic purple petals had long since fallen to the ground. We would watch the blue jays fight with sparrows. It was so bittersweet to admire the beauty of the bird, while knowing that he was aggressive to the avian family who had made a home in the birdhouse that I would watch as I sat reading on the porch swing.  

When I think of the natural world, I think of gardens and birdbaths. I think of hiking in the forests of northwestern Pennsylvania. I think of black widow spiders as foreign myths that only exist in unlovely places, like the South.  

Three years ago, I moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia for a teaching job. One of the first things that I noticed was a flowering tree. For weeks, I tried to name it. I thought, this might be dogwood, but the flowers weren’t right. It looked like it could be the distant relative of the hydrangea, but that didn’t seem to fit either. It was a tree that I had never seen before, not on the many walks with my grandmother through the park, as we named each flower that we passed.

I eventually learned that it was a crape myrtle, a southern tree which Southern Living magazine calls the “essential southern plant” and says that it is “among the most satisfactory of plants for the South: showy summer flowers, attractive bark, and (in many cases) brilliant fall color make them year-round garden performers.” Crape Myrtles don’t work well with autumnal frosts, which are common in the North, as “sudden frosts following warm, humid fall weather often freeze leaves while they’re still green, ruining the show” (http://www.southernliving.com). Like a crape myrtle in the north, I felt out of my element, like my colors were dull. I realized that I was no longer at home. I could handle the frost, but not high humidity and warm nights that never allow for a breeze through an open window.

In Virginia, snow is a luxury. An autumn day below 80 degrees is a blessing.

Not only did I feel out of sorts with my surroundings, I also felt so distant from my family. I no longer had Sunday dinners filled with roasts, warm bread, and ending with a Baptist-style dessert. I usually ate dinners by myself or with my friend Emily, another 20-something who missed home-style dinners, too.

Lisa and Joseph moved in to my apartment building, across the hall, in July. Each morning, as I left for school, Lisa would sit outside on the stoop of our old Victorian house and in between the long drags on her menthol cigarette, she would say: “Good Mornin’, Darlin. It’s a pleasure to see you.” She meant it.

With every well wish, I missed home just a little less.

She often brought me over treats like potato soup and boiled peanuts. She gave me advice on how to survive a hurricane. Even more, she gave me someone to look forward to each day. Her thick, sweet, Tennessee drawl was comforting in a way. She didn’t say, “yinz” or talk about running the “sweeper,” or even that she had to clean the “haus.” But, her accent reminded me that she was displaced, too. If she could leave Tennessee, I could live in Virginia for a while, I told myself.

When she told me that she was moving in January, I was devastated. But, she was moving with Joseph to a house in the country, only about 20 minutes from the apartment and she quickly invited me over for dinner.

Now, I sit on her deck, beside a crape myrtle, overlooking the pond.  The comfort and familiarity that I find here is much like the comfort that I found in my grandparent’s yard. There is an elaborate garden, much like my grandmother’s, in the front of the house, but there’s something lovely about watching the squirrels dodge in and out of the poplar trees. Back here, I’m in the woods. The thick canopy allows just enough light to shine through, creating splotches of sunshine on the mulchy floor. Apparently, there had been more trees here a few years ago before the power company “thinned” it out.

Even now, the trees and various bushes and greenery remind me of what it means to be rooted to a place. It’s easy to think that our roots come from a certain location, that we have to be connected, as if by an umbilical cord, to the land that we knew as children in order to survive. I have learned (and will continue to learn, I’m sure), that our roots can come from people. Sweet words, stability, support, and unconditional love cannot come from a pile of leaves, a garden of tulips, or even at the sight of a sparrow.

I yearn to walk under the thick branches of the maple tree that stands in front of my grandmother’s house. I want to walk up to a sycamore tree and peel off layers of bark to expose the smooth, light, flesh beneath, like I did as a child. But now, I can sit under the poplar tree and watch the skinny southern squirrels creep up behind each other and race down the bank to the thin stream that leads to the pond. For a moment, I am no longer homesick.