pulling sheets from ghosts

October 3rd, 2007
Pulling sheets from Ghosts

I have put so many words to paper over the years that I
have forgotten most of what I have written. This is only
exacerbated by my real reluctance to go back and re-read
what I have written for fear that I will find it wanting.
Nevertheless, I was cleaning out the cellar yesterday and
came across a paper I had written in college describing
the leafing out of trees and shrubs as "throwing sheets
over ghosts." It is not the most penetratingly accurate
metaphor I've ever written, but it does have a certain
flow.
In many ways, autumn in New England is the time when
nature cleans out her cellar, discarding all the chewed,
wind-tossed, threadbare foliage of the growing season the
way we discard dusty, rusty exercise equipment that once
seemed so promising. In winter I am so impatient for
warm weather that I follow the slow daily increase in day
length as though my life depended on it. But by October I
am frankly tired of summer, which always comes as a mild
shock. I welcome the end of summer and the fall of
innumerable leaves with the same satisfaction I get from
cleaning out all the old files and cardboard from my
overcrowded basement. What was a dense, verdant,
impenetrable landscape becomes open again as the sheet
of leaves falls away and reveals sky, rock and bare
skeleton trunks pockmarked with institutional green
circles of lichen and deeper green felts of moss upon moss.
My cellar is quite roomy and neat for now, and so are the
woods once the last of the oak leaves have paraglided to
earth. Winter is cold and bleak and desperately long, but
at least there is a palpable simplicity to the white and the
gray: a pureness of form that is wasabi for the senses. By
next March I will once again be counting the minutes of
sunlight and welcoming the first stirring insects and
swelling buds - those same buds that will bring a welcome
sense of clutter and closeness to the gaunt, wide open
spaces as we settle back into the long short summer. I just
wish I could have the same sense of welcome anticipation
toward the inevitable swell of basement clutter that I will
surely face again by then.