Everything fall-ing into place

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2024 (340 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Not-so-early morning, and the turning birch leaves are lit golden by the morning sun, a sun still low on the horizon. Outside, a collection of birds: four unexpected robins in the top of a big poplar, a flight of starlings (probably the family that nests in the hollowed-out tree bole by the house), the performing blue jays, a quickly-departing yellow-shafted flicker and the curious, head-tilting chickadees so brave they fly to shrub branches in easy arm’s reach, studying you with their black-bead eyes.

One of the starlings checks out the nest-hole, as if looking for things forgotten. Chickadees dee-dee-dee-dee.

The fireweed is sedge-brown and ramrod straight, a forest of stalks swaying in unison with the slight breeze, almost all of the seed fluff departed, the last shreds of it rain-whipped around the stalk-heads.

It is unspeakably beautiful here, out on the most easterly coast, beautiful from bright morning until the evening when the trees are all matte-black cutouts against the falling, fading horizon.

It is also incredibly grounding: my feet know their place.

A disconnected thought intrudes: someone wrote to me two weeks ago to say I write columns in unconnected paragraphs that aren’t anything like cohesive pieces. I understand, and I disagree, in equal measures. That is, in fact, possible.

I had company over yesterday, so there are two spoons, two bowls still in the sink, the bowls waiting to be washed with traces of beef-barley soup on their sides. Beef and barley remains and the fading light of evening connect, even if the connection isn’t immediately obvious. And that is my answer.

There was a freeze last night, all the grass rigid-stiff this morning, so walking means your feet crunch with every step and leave unexpected white icy boot-print trails behind.

Out across the yard and down the road, four apple trees visited: first, the perfect red, and then its neighbour, serviceable red. Serviceable for pies and crumbles: thick-skinned and not my first pick for eating. Low acid and strong sugar. Then, the hidden tree in the woods that Leslie found, and finally, the yellow apple tree of plenty. Four apples eaten and honestly compared, four apples each with their own particular attributes, four cores thrown in likely places to hopefully start new trees.

There is, somewhere, the perfect apple, yet unfound. I believe that. Sometimes, I think I’m close. Sometimes, far.

I arrived here at just the right time: a yellow-shafted flicker flew through a single-pane shed window the day after I got here, so it was old-school stripping window putty and pulling the metal window-points from the sash to reuse them — I’m not even sure you can buy them anymore, I haven’t seen them in years.

The glass from a leftover old window in the small barn, so old it was assembled with joinery — no nails. Just tongue-and-groove corners, tongues on the top and bottom sash, the grooves punched through each side rail. The tongues held in place with small wooden wedges, knocked into place and cut flush. A simple precision that is not returning to us any time soon.

Laundry already on the line — though it won’t dry. The days so far have been changeable: warm sun, then a quick glowering change to grey and rain, then sun again. Snow flurries, sun, rain, graupel — that odd soft corn snow, truly failed hail — then brilliant sun and yellow-edged clouds. The laundry’s inside now — tomorrow may be a better bet.

I’ve only been here two days. Already, everything is familiar and immediately at hand.

I have pernicious alders to cut back with a borrowed brush hook; the alder shoulders in and crowds the spruce and pine, replaces the red osier dogwood. I like the dogwood, its red bark and tricolour harlequin fall leaves; it’s an accidental ornamental, a showy thing that arrives and performs on its own terms.

I’m trying hard to get used to moving slowly — trying to adapt to the idea that there is no rush, that the idea is to get done what can be done. That it isn’t what must be done.

No WiFi here — barely a cellphone signal. I’ll head over to the neighbours eventually, across the yard for 100 metres or so and through the brush to sit on their porch and poach a connection and wing this column away.

Technology seems distant, beyond electricity for the lights and the gentle tick of the baseboard heaters. Those heaters: I’m saving the meagre wood supply for winter visits, so the woodstove is dark and cold.

Sometimes, the AM radio has thin, reedy atmospherics, like you are being sent precise and important stories from the past.

I go out across the small brook to cut down a big widowmaker spruce, 30 or more feet tall and stone-grey dead, its base riddled with the honeycomb work of black shiny carpenter ants, only a circular half-inch of wood even holding it up. I found a small opening, hip-high, and inside, an abandoned nest inside the trunk, a tightly-woven collection of plucked down, pink fibreglass insulation and grass. Maybe the work of a pair of nuthatches, given its size and location.

The tree twisted crazy like a corkscrew when it fell — sometimes it just happens that way, and I had no idea where I was supposed to be standing.

It fell slowly but deliberately, the trunk noisy with pops and cracks as the wood failed, so I knew it was falling, though it barely moved.

Eventually, it fell away from me, but only because I moved arbitrarily left instead of right, more accident than design: it ignored the notch I cut to direct it, so when it finally fell, I put the grumbling, shaking chainsaw down and shut it off, and took off my gloves a finger one a time and breathed deeply for a bit, rain dappling down gently all around me. And the moss was electric green stars, and the changing leaves on the small plants were like brilliant flames, and the bouquet of the fall rot and decay filled my nose with a richness unfamiliar.

And it seemed as though the sound of the small brook down the hill developed into a full-throated roar for 30 seconds or so, like blood rushing through your ears, while I brushed away the sticky sawdust on my pants and tried to act nonchalant before the audience of exactly no one.

Large world. Small me. Lucky.

Later, night came like night does, curtains falling.

Hosanna.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca