The Restless: Autumn Writing & Remembering of Other Worlds
I write more in the autumn, or rather when it is turning to autumn, and there are little yellow leaves in the silver poplars and the scraggly ash tree out the kitchen window. It’s no secret some restlessness comes over me in the changing light and the air that blows cool. It happened to me today in fact, all weekend my mind would not still, and nothing could satisfy it. I wanted to write, but I wouldn’t write. I wanted to create, but I wouldn’t create. I wanted to read, to find some wholesome beauty somewhere to feed my soul, as if there was something I had forgotten to do or needed to do but could not remember what or how, and there was no having it.
The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why. To all appearance the summer’s pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and color were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year . . . the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure . . . obedient to the call.
—Franklin Grahame
I haven’t taken up lens and gone out and looked at the world, been to walk in my fields or visited the rowan grove or the woodland. I haven’t been to look at the hills far and blue in the distance nor taken a satisfactory picture of anything. There was this great concentration of mind and body on work and people, and now that it is September, fickle September, there is a heaviness, a weariness of all that is out there and a deep need for everything in here, where I can hear the quiet of changing things and let the ringing in my head from voices and wants and cares, and the constant need to be entertained, cease into the far away call of the brush wolf and the wind in the grass, to eat the apples fresh from picking in the light of a half moon and a prairie excursion with the Other Girl. We are of Other Worlds, she and I. We speak a language too dear to be shared, my sister and me. We are the girls who find oracle in the feather of owls and mystery in traipsing across field with bucket and dog to find the cherry red apples in the easterly regions of the wind break. We know the things of the wood and the prairie, of the animals that live there, of the singing of songs in the light of the moon and the last red traces of the sunset, of the homage and meaning to put into song the feeling and quintessence of a place, a moment, a lifetime.
I am here now, in that mysterious place of in-between, no longer summer, not quite autumn, and my mind is restless and I cannot settle when the winged creatures are flitting and going and the sun is changing in the tilt of the earth. So I wandered, as I’ve often wandered in the thirty years of walking this good earth. And I found I had forgotten, as I always forget, how nature has a way of bringing God-quiet to the soul. I was afraid these ways would grow old with me, and they would no longer work to ease the ringing in my ears made of voices and screens and headphones to cover more noise and more voices, that I would have to search out and move on and find something else to ease the burden life can become.
But I remembered how to hear it, remembered how to listen, and how could I be afraid of forgetting. I marveled I could remember, still, yet again and again. All seasons are simply that, a season to stay and a season to go, ever changing and always the same. God-quiet came and God-quiet hallowed, and I took the Other Girl with me with bucket and dog and crossed field and picked apples in the moonlight, with the grass seed getting in our socks and brushing our legs, and the geese bedding down on the pond over the hill, and autumn-scented evening breeze taking us home to book and chocolate and the reading of stories in arm chairs in a little room called Mole End.
And here I am again, that old lover of autumn returned, far more than cozy socks, hot drinks, pumpkins. Autumn is the sound the wind makes when the earth breathes cool and quiet, the feeling in the birds that make them gather and flock and rise and fall over fallow fields and ancient ponds for seed and sustenance. It is the light changing from searing summer to calming gold, it is the color of blue in the sky, the sound of wood chopped and stacked. Autumn isn’t a place, it is a state of being. It is our natural desires after the rollicking of summer to slow and still and find peace like the wild things of the earth. It is that movement in men and beast stirred by the changing sun and the earth turning, the burrowing in, the shoring up, gathering together that we all still know deep in our bones from the ancient of days, though we’ve long forgotten how to use it or remember that it is there.
Still it is within us, the Other Girl and I, we of the Other World: the search, the longing that nothing on earth can satisfy, the ear-mark we were made for another world. It is only the leaning of one season into another, the in-between of hot and cold, summer and autumn, the going out and the searching and looking through lens, and seeing, as if for the first time . . . this God-quiet of autumn.