There are many sad truths in life. We find many of them in the garden, contributing to the melancholy way we feel in fall when our natural tendency is to do a retrospective similar to the way we view the timeline of the year at New Year’s. The same transitioning from one season to the next draws us into such thinking.
Actually, the inspiration for these thoughts came from the very mundane action of copying one of my older posts from here to the garden website. The sad truths of blogs are that they are even more ephemeral than most writing… the audience for blogs demands fresh new content and is loath to dig up past posts, unless a search engine happens to oblige. And so if there is a post which shouldn’t get lost in the jumble of daily writings, I have started to retrieve it and put it on the website.
But back to the beginning topic, the melancholy of my garden. Don’t you feel it, too? The promise of new growth and life and hope are replaced with the promise of decay, of the deep sleep and hoped for survival of cold winters. And unless you are deep in denial, you recognize the sorrow of that. I’ve read those who say they delight in the turn of life to death and all its natural circle, but I doubt them. I sincerely doubt that they are so resigned to such endings and I believe it is only in the hope of natures reprized thaw of spring and return of life that they are truly finding their delights.
Not that melancholic fading and demise don’t have their beauty. They do, but isn’t it in the full spectrum of remembering their beauty of bud and bloom, in their rivaling struggle to retain their tints of sugars and sap of the growing season? That we allow for the tints of death at all …all emptied as it becomes of colors and its disintegration into the lost world of soils, humus, and duff is in what it may yet become.
My rejoicing in winter is that I survive its powerful hold. That my fires are warm, and my cuddled toes are deep in the wool of socks, while the drink in my hand is steaming. That I look out the frost glazed windows to a world of battered beiges and the white of frozen snow blankets from inside my little fortified walls. Waiting for the sure vanquish of winter by the surge of spring’s newly warmed winds, carrying the change into a new season that I have been given the grace to experience.
But until then, that the fresh arrival of spring, the autumn and its fading colors bring a sadness that all things have an end, and the mighty efforts of one season are over and now weighed out for comparisons against all the others.
