Field Notes —

Fall Begins, Again

By Curtiss Clark

As months grow old, the clean white squares of my desk calendar become defaced with angled jottings and their attendant underlines, circles, exclamation points, and sweeping arrows from one day to another, smeared here and there with a wash of coffee or tea — pretty shabby accommodations for things deemed important enough for me not to entrust to memory. And in the occasional square in neat 6-point Times Roman italic are messages from the culture: Armed Forces Day, Ash Wednesday, Passover Begins at Sundown, Administrative Professional’s Day, and just last Friday, Fall Begins.

The earth’s solstices and equinoxes, of course, transcend human culture. They keep their appointments in the continuum of eternity, along with all the other natural cycles that rock the cradle of existence, without the help of calendars. But I am grateful for the written reminder. I want to know when the world tilts toward winter. I don’t want to forget the succession of cycles stirring the galaxies and all their moving parts. I want to remember that not all events are human events.

Lately, I have been immersed in human events — specifically, the events of my own family. My mother died this summer at the age of 92. Since then, my brother, sister, and I, along with our steadfast spouses, have been sifting through the archeology of the house where she lived, which has been our family home since my grandfather bought the place in 1914. We all have our own homes now, and the time has come for this house to belong to another family. Much of its contents, however — furniture, artifacts, and old books — we cannot part with. So many objects are freighted with meaning and memory. We have been sorting, saving, and distributing several generations of family stuff, which will settle into our own homes to await a similar sorting when we ourselves are cycled into history.

On the day that my calendar told me Fall Begins, rainfall began as well. I stood outside the old family home in a torrent, watching a couple of strong men operating even stronger tools and equipment lift an ancient millstone placed in the yard by my grandfather (I have no idea how) nearly 100 years ago. Sometime in the 18th Century, the stone was quarried from New England’s granite bedrock, chiseled into a circle, scored with channels to facilitate the grinding of flour, spun round and round for untold years by the might of a river, and eventually discarded somewhere for a century or so before it was spotted by my grandfather, who knew a good stone when he saw one.

Last Friday, the men and equipment were moving the one-ton stone to my yard, where I plan to use it to hold down all the memories I ever had of these previous generations so they don’t scatter in the wind now that they are cut loose from this familiar place.

A few paces away, a towering spruce tree undulated in the rain and wind. From where I stood, I could barely see the top. A few paces beyond that, the stump of an ancient maple tree deepened in color under storm’s shellacking. The maple had been cut down a year and a half ago, diseased and insect ridden.

The spruce was planted by my grandfather at about the same time he coaxed the millstone into place. The maple sprouted nearly 100 years before that. There we all were, the maple stump, the towering spruce, and me at various points in our respective life cycles lined up like adjacent squares on a desk calendar, just three beats in the continuum of eternity, witnessing a great round stone on the move once again from one place to another.

(Moving heavy stones has turned out to be humankind’s most lasting mark on eternity. Thousands of years after people disappear, the stones they pile here and there are the only trace of their lives.)

As another autumn begins, the cycles of life continue to spin like a millstone through the cold, dark side of the calendar. There is comfort in knowing that life is cyclical and not just a meandering uncertain path to nowhere in particular. The earth always circles back around to the exact point where Fall Begins again, connecting those of us who are still here with every ancestor and every descendant. Loss and creation balance the wheel. And the cycle will repeat long after this old millstone of mine is worn away to grains of sand by the rain and wind. Everything is grist for the great immutable mill of eternity.

(More than 80 other essays in Curtiss Clark’s Field Notes series can be found at www.field-notebook.com).