BEYOND WINTER: The
Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—
As I walked this morning, I watched the leaves rustle restlessly in the trees. They know something is coming. For them, it means death. I’m sorry for them, but for me, it means life.
This morning there was more yellow in the leaves, less green.
I think moving to Oakland City when I was ten was what gave me my love of baseball and of school. And why I’m happy when I see the leaves turn from summer to autumn. They mean the World Series, the fulfillment of the baseball season, and school, the end of a long hot boring summer. The chance, at last, to see my friends.
Until age ten I had been a city boy in the near-east inner-city of Indianapolis, running from bullies, walking to the store to do errands for Mother or Mrs. Dickerson, who lived next door, the only black person for blocks around, and riding the street car downtown to Cadle Tabernacle with my sister to see some “uplifting” drama or concert.
Then we moved to a farm with no indoor plumbing but with a whole lot of chores that my parents thought were perfect for a ten-year-old boy…
…mowing, milking, hoeing, feeding [chickens, pigs, etc], chopping [wood, weeds], chasing [horse, cows, pigs, chickens—anything that got where it shouldn’t be], throwing [hay-up onto the wagon, or down from the loft], plowing, picking [vegetables, berries, fruit], gathering [eggs], carrying [water in, used water out], shucking [corn], harnessing [horse to plow or wagon], plucking [feathers off the chicken so it could be fried], digging [potatoes, beets, graves for anything that died]…
Is it any wonder that I decided I’d rather play baseball or go to school? Or that I went into a profession that is all about relating to people rather than to animals or tools or nature?
September is a season for joy, and I hope you feel September joys, even if, incomprehensibly, you don’t like baseball or school.
John Robert McFarland
“If I were a bird, I would
fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” George Eliot
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