To Everything A Season

Out my back door the last hot days of August have turned the lane to dust.  Yesterday, as I walked  the fields, curing grasses crunched underfoot. Dogwood and sarvis blushed at the woods edge, and native grasses rushed to set seed before the first frost. Today the flowers of autumn are just beginning to bloom. A profusion of New England Asters will soon nod in the September breeze providing nectar for lingering butterflies and hummingbirds. This year, more than ever, I look to the blooming of the asters for a sign that next year will be gentler to us here on the farm, that the world will become a more forgiving place.

When I was a girl, my Grandmother Long taught me a verse about the changing seasons. I especially loved the lines describing September, the month of her birth, and the beginning to her favorite season. The poem went like this: “January freezes, February thaws. March sends up her breezes, April buds the haws. In May the sun shines brightly, June brings purple haze. July’s days are scorching, August’s lilies blaze. September blooms the asters for Octobers golden crown. November leaves come tumbling, December’s trees are brown.”  

That childish verse,  recited to me by my Grandmother, echoed a promise. It assured me that the seasons would come and go on time, following one upon the other as they had since the Beginning. Today, with the threat of climate change calling into question our very survival on this planet,  this simple promise holds great import. What would our lives be like if summer and winter, springtime and harvest were to vanish for all time?

In the early part of the twentieth century, My grandparents farmed the bottomland, along Spring Creek near the little community of Relfe, Missouri. The old farm was home not only to them, but to my dad and uncle, Grandmother’s maiden sister, Aunt Fannie, and my Great Grandmother Duncan who lived to be 102.  Grandmother plowed the fields with her own mule, kept the large family garden, and milked the family cow. Throughout her long life she spun rich tales about panthers in the hills behind Spring Creek, the night the barn burned, and the time my father fell from the roof of the barn. She painted images for me of Dad being pulled in a little cart by their goat, Billy Whiskers,  and my grandfather riding astride Old Colonel, the bay stallion he used to herd the cattle.  Well into her 94th year, Grandmother and I spent time together. We sang in front of the her old upright piano, savored afternoon tea with biscuits and homemade watermellon perserves, and walked together along dusty autumn lanes lined with her beloved asters.

The morning she had her stroke, that September day when the eggs dropped one by one from her hand as she prepared breakfast, I went to see her for the last time.  She lay in the hospital wrapped in a deep coma, her snow-white hair lying soft upon her pillow, her heart laboring under the weight of years. I took her hand and whispered to her about the blue September sky. I promised I would go in the afternoon to water  the ferns that sat either side of the painted swing on her front porch, because in the fall of 1978 September had been dry as a bone.

When I returned from my errand, Grandmother was gone. As I sat beside the shell that had once housed the spirit of Maude Marion Duncan, I understood for the first time why that old poem about the seasons had touched me. Like the asters under the blue September sky, Grandmother’s life had come full circle. But it did not end there. Seeds fall into the ground. Spring comes round again. Flowers boom. Autumn returns. The simple passing of the seasons becomes our connection to the one hope that sustains us: Life, in whatever form, will endure.   

“September blooms the asters for October’s golden crown.”  As I water the ferns on my front porch, I think of  Grandmother. The world she knew has vanished. Someday, so will mine. But today the fall rains have returned. The asters proclaim that just around the bend lies at least one more harvest. For me, that is enough. . . more than enough

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