Leafy Memories

I’m sitting here listening to Aaron Copland’s “Our Town Suite” at the suggestion of a friend of mine and it’s simply gorgeous. Arresting and sad and flowing, a sense of majesty, and that swelling force that all of Copland’s music has for me, a sense that life goes on and on and we’re ALIVE! Embrace it all, the sad joy of it, the surprising heartbreak, the little miracles, the beckonings, like music, urging you on and on and on. Copland is so American, the essence of being American to me, the deep flowing, discordant all of it. And “Our Town” is just splendid. “Appalachian Spring” has always been a favorite and recently “The Promise of Living” has become a close second, but “Our Town” – so New England – may pass them both. If you’ve never heard any of these 3 pieces of music, treat yourself to them.

It’s been a full day of outside chores and shoring up for the winter. We were treated to a sunny day today with a touch of warmth which was most welcome. It’s been coooold for October, in the 20’s a lot, 18 this morning. You know what? I know I live in Vermont, but that’s too soon for these temperatures. Today, Richard and I finished planting the new trees we just got over the weekend – a Robinson crabapple and 2 Norway Spruce, all 3 on sale in Thetford at a spectacular nursery. Chris, a friend of mine who works there, kindly offered to drop the trees by since he lives in the vicinity. What a mensch. The trees seem so suited to our land. We’re glad to have them here and welcomed them with mulch, top soil and plenty of water.

I’m such a sucker for trees, always have been. I loved our towering oaks in our backyard in Fort Wayne, loved to climb them, up, up high, as far as I could go and sway in the wind clenching on to the thin trunk up high there, at one with the leaves. Pretty glorious.
Here in Vermont, I love the ancient sugar maples, of course, but oh the birch and eastern larch, the fir and spruce and pine. And the ash, splendid. I’ll take them all! Oh, what would my life be like without trees?

But back to chores. We’ve been moving wood that’s been curing all summer down into our cellar, a job that’s almost done. And just in time too, because the next pile in need of curing is ready to take its place. This afternoon, with our neighbor Royce’s help, we felled 4 HUGE gnarled trees, I think they’re called “Popples”, at least that’s what Royce calls them, which is the eastern name for Aspen. Royce tried to discourage me from piling it up for fuel wood for next year, claiming that it doesn’t put out much heat, but I was not dissuaded. I want to experience it for myself. Besides, Popple is not going to comprise the whole wood supply. We’ll have a good variety of hard and soft woods, deciduous and evergreen. Until sunset, the air was filled with the buzz of my chainsaw as I cut and sheared and trimmed the fallen giants, with Richard toting or dragging the branches and logs to various piles, in wait for the chipper we’re renting this Friday. Sawdust will fly!!

All morning was filled with insulation work up in the old hay loft of our “once” barn. We measured and cut all sizes and shapes of 3 inch thick solid foam insulation, puzzled them into the appropriate spaces, and then spray foamed any remaining gaps into non-existence. Next up? Sheet rock and/or blue boarding.

I’ve been trying to get to writing this particular for a while now, but chores and travel and friend’s visits got in the way. The other grey afternoon, I was driving down to White River Junction for some errand or business and was listening to a CD of Donald Hall poems read by Mr. Hall himself, and there’s one poem about leaves that starts with he and his family after a football game in Ann Arbor years ago, walking home, kicking the leaves, the autumn leaves, and this action conjures all of these memories connected to leaves. And listening to that magnificent poem did the same for me. Autumn, late autumn memories, leaves past peak, most of them on the ground. I remember my sister and I playing in the leaves that late November Saturday and Sunday, refusing to come in to watch the coverage of John F. Kennedy’s funeral. “It’s history!” my parents pleaded. And I was a history nut as a kid! But oh the delight to run and dive into piles and piles of brown oak leaves in our back yard trumped history hands down.

That is unless Mrs. Macy had come out to spray our piles of leaves down with her hose the night before. Mrs. Macy was the “crazy woman” who lived next door to us. Among other weird things, she thought my sister and I were trying to kill her. I don’t know where she got that idea, but it didn’t help matters much when I was in our back yard once playing with my bow and arrow and I shot my arrow straight up in the air and the wind took it and it landed SPROING! just a few feet from where she was tending her garden. There was a scream and I cringed thinking that wasn’t going to help her paranoia much. She claimed our leaves blew over into her yard. And that’s why the late night leaning over our fence to hose our piles of unruly leaves into a soggy compost heap. Not much fun tearing into that spongey mess the next day. Yeck!

And she was a bit crazy. I remember coming home from Methodist Youth Fellowship one Sunday night in December and saw a paddy wagon in her driveway. She had walked into our across the street neighbor’s house in her bathrobe and slippers, locked herself in their bathroom and crawled under their sink, refusing to come out. They finally had to take the door off its hinges and the doctors took her away in a straight jacket. And what does this have to do with autumn leaf memories? Nothing, but it’s a good story, and lets you know that things were really hoppin’ in Northern Indiana suburbs in the mid-60’s.

My mom and sister used to mail me autumn leaves from Indiana when I was going to school in California. I went 3 years without experiencing autumn and my heart ached. They knew this and would send me envelopes filled with red maples, yellow elms, maybe a hawthorn or a sassafras. Oaks definitely. And what color did oak leaves turn? Didn’t it vary? I forget. I just remember them in brown piles on the ground.

Oh, raking leaves! I forgot about that too. Now that was not fun, no matter how much I Norman Rockwell up my autumn memories. And yes, Mrs. Macy, the wind would definitely whip up those leaves, which was especially frustrating if you were raking leaves for a little extra pocket change and the wind was not in an agreeable mood when it came to keeping leaves in neat piles long enough for you to come back and stuff them into large plastic bags.

The smell of fallen leaves. Mmmmm. Slightly musty, woody, comforting, like walking into a tobaccoists shop, that big honkin’ humidor with all the aromas that makes you want to take up pipe smoking immediately. I was walking on the wooded paths back to the end of our property a couple days ago, and the whole forest floor was strewn with a carpet of gorgeous leaves. And not crunchy, not a sound, just a comfortable, padded, forest support. Oh, and the whole forest floor was covered for as far as I could see. And I looked up and there was the sky again, no leafy green canopy, no, not until Spring, not until May, mid-May. Now it’s bare branches reaching up toward the sky, the stars, the sun. Just a few leaves left. The leaves have left. And the leaves left look like tree teeth in an elderly tree mouth. And that just reminded me of Jack-o-lantern smiles, those big grins with carved single teeth.

And now, I’m spent. I must to bed. Nothing more to say. And I’m left with an image from Donald Halls’ poem that I’d like to share with you where he talks of coming to his New Hampshire grandparents during college, up to help bring in the last vegetables and then pile maple leaves up against the foundation of his grandparent’s home, weighted down by spruce branches, this to insulate their home for the winter. Afterward they would sit silent in the kitchen – Donald Hall, his grandmother and grandfather – all sipping black coffee that his grandmother had made, rocking in rockers, nothing to say. There’s a kinship I feel with that long ago image, with that shoring up the home for winter, rocking around a wood stove to give one warmth, satisfied after a good day’s work out in the cold, with nothing left to say.

It’s a scene that could've been accompanied by Aaron Copland music.