This is an essay I originally shared last October. It is an essay about the shifting seasons, and what the return of all things tells us about the truth of the world. It is a meandering meditation through the countryside and shops and fields of wildflowers. At the time I had a chubby baby to tote around. Now that baby is a wild toddler. The world spins. What remains the same? What do we love and recognize with each passing season?
Yesterday was the first day of fall (and Hobbit Day!). Here the days are grey and getting cooler. So I figured it would be a good time to share this ode to the seasons, and falling in love with a place.
First, a few quick updates:
I am currently spinning with ideas, — I have at least three essays fully written in my head — but have had no time to put the proverbial pen to paper. It’s frustrating! But believe it or not, I head off for Ireland with
in just a little over a week! (On that note, we had one last minute cancellation so if you’re a solo traveler in a spontaneous mood… send me a message!) The preparations for this trip, both for my family and for my work, means that every day is pretty jam packed. Essay writing and podcasting is taking a backseat.Before I go, I hope to have two essays out for paid subscribers, but if not I hope you’ll understand — they’re good ones, I promise (in one you’ll meet the real Lucy Pevensie!). And I’ll certainly have some monthly musings to share with everyone.
But for now, back into the hills…
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass […] What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
―George Eliot,The Mill on the Floss
I drive down the lane past Shackleton’s tree. This is a tree where we found an injured screech owl, a delicate, beautiful creature with sad, frightened eyes and a broken wing. We named him for Ernest Shackleton, the intrepid Arctic explorer and my husband’s current interest at the time.
I turn right toward the farm stand, the one with the jumbo eggs and the ripe tomatoes and the cinderella pumpkins. It is self serve - honor system - shockingly trusting, but perhaps not so much so, here in this ambling, open land. I write down what I take in the open notebook - one dozen jumbo eggs - flashing the Venmo code to pay.
Then there’s the old, too-narrow bridge, the one I can’t believe horse trailers make it across each week for hunting, the one that’s given our car one too many nicks and scrapes on the bumper. I’m taking the long way - extending a baby’s poorly timed car nap, something that would usually annoy me - no hour to myself at home, no chance to get anything done. But today, I don’t mind. The world is simply too beautiful: Cold and open and inviting. I revel in the backroads, the rainbow of fall foliage.
We make it to St. John’s Episcopal Church, a stone church that looks straight out of the English countryside. It was built in 1815 - Civil War, land to houses, buggies to motor cars. So much change. Who worshipped here, who loved here? I leave the car running a moment and walk the gravel lot - faded gravestones, open sky.
Leaving St. John’s, I turn back to loop toward the butcher and the farmer’s market. On the way I pass an inviting field of wildflowers. It seems entirely without purpose, this big open field. I note that it is near the hunt club. Did some member plant this field? Maybe. I know from experience there’s a certain love for land you can only get from riding in it, passing through the streams and pastures and winding woods that you’d never know were there from the road.
If I loved a field, I would plant wildflowers in it. Love wants beauty, more beauty, all the time, and this was a loving, beautiful, overflowing place. I pull the car over and sit and watch - bees hum, drone. The wind picks up.
We move on.
On the way, I chuckle when I pass the horse tack consignment - they’re having their fun for Halloween. Two horse skeleton displays, a mare and foal, nuzzle next to a pile of pumpkins. It makes me think of the oddly macabre decor that has turned up on our own quiet lane.
I was taken aback one morning walking with the stroller - a dementor-like cloaked skeleton hung from our neighbor’s tree, its skull face grinning at me. Then the following evening I came upon an abandoned dirt bike by the woods - I assumed someone had parked it temporarily - until I noticed a plastic skeleton riding on it. Apparently it was meant as decoration.
Whenever I see things like this I picture it’s beginnings - when our neighbors saw a skeleton display and thought, yes, this needs to hang from my tree, and they bought it, took it down one morning and meticulously hung it up. They stood back and nodded with satisfaction. Did they feel festive or ghoulish or part of something bigger than themselves? Did they want to scare the postman? Or me? Am I overthinking this?1
Onto the butcher and the market - local milk, lettuce, peppers - my grocery bags are starting to resemble the golds and greens and whites of my drive - leaves and grass and skeleton displays. The baby is up and I’m toting her around with me. People are commenting and smiling and I’m making that sort of repetitive small talk with strangers that you do when you’re carrying a baby around - only 9 months old - I know, so big! - it goes fast, I know, I know - can you smile, Lucy? Oh she’s shy - yes, yes thank you, I sure think she’s cute, too, but I’m biased, I know…and so on, and so on.
I like it. It makes me feel at home and safe in the world. There’s a sort of benevolence to this chatter, a stroking of the head, a pat-pat, there-there, we’re all here together - children are growing, we’re buying our food, and this is all good and right - feeling.
I make one more stop on the way home. Old Bosley. A beautiful church buried in the hills. The church is lovely but its the graveyard I like best, because it has the best views around. I’ve taken friends here for picnics, for sunset walks and good conversation. If you park down the way at the Quaker Meeting House you’ll have a nice couple mile walk over backroads and wide fields. I always liked a walk that ended in a view.
And this view is mine.
I walked here before my first daughter was born - days before, in fact, hoping to encourage her to make an imminent appearance. I walked here with the dogs on blustery lonely days. I came here on All Soul’s Day and whispered prayers of eternal rest. There are names I know now on the graves from repeated visits. We nod at each other, friendly acquaintances, these gravestones and I.
This hillside has become an important and beautiful place to me, precisely in the ways I have come to know it, in how it has become familiar and even humdrum in its being there. As so many places along this morning’s drive have become.
The familiar gets passed over these days. I’m as guilty as any. Novelty is endlessly inviting, endlessly exciting. And I’m not denying its goodness - the role of travel and new places, new faces, all that.
But to love something, to really, really know something, there has to be that knee deep, days-in-days-out, being.
There has to be a history. And to have a history - you have to stay.
A late afternoon walk with the toddler - a farm kid if I ever saw one. I say, colloquially, that we should go in a certain direction, say hello to the tree, and so on. Well, she takes me at my word and on approaching said tree she greets it with as much seriousness as any new person I’ve introduced her to, perhaps more so - Hello, tree, she says, giving its big trunk an affectionate pat. It’s beautiful, she mutters, looking up into his bare limbs, stretched out against the wide windy sky.
We go out in the field with the big pond. She’s intent on gathering dandelions, generous bouquets she sneaks into my jacket pocket. I hear a tap tap tap. I look up. A pileated woodpecker flys up. I smile at this chance encounter.
Generous. The world is generous.
This is my overwhelming thought, walking our benevolent neighbor's land, pockets bursting with flowers, leaves wild with color.
I think of my own youth, of afternoons in tree branches, of the woods with the little stream that seemed so wildly other, how it was so adventurous and dangerous to hop those rocks, a mile or so and a scratchy walkie-talkie away from my parents. Afternoons rolling in grass, bike riding in the chilly evening air.
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it.”2
“The things we love tell us what we are.” - St Thomas Aquinas
What we are. Earth and sky and grass and ground.
“Earthing” - this is a phrase you’ll hear in crunchy circles - it means to feel the Earth, usually with your bare feet. To go out in the morning, in the dew or in the frost, and let your body touch real Earth, in its hardness or muddiness or wetness. And doing this, actually touching the Earth with your bare skin, has been shown to improve sleep, speed wound healing, increase heart rate variability.3
I’m writing about Nature, but what I really want to be writing about is Home.
But for me, the land, the presence of flowers or frost, of hills and trees, of horses and dogs, of cows and crows and blackbird swarms, has been home. And I’m only now learning just how much that is deep inside me, something that I have loved because it has become a sort of story in my head, about what Beauty is, and what it means to Love something, to love Somewhere.
There was a study conducted in the U.K. where students were taught about magpies (those funny little black and white birds) - some of them were taught only scientific facts, the others were taught folklore and stories, and then they were all asked - should magpies be protected? Should we care about them, help them survive as a species?
The students who were only taught the science, the facts, were much less likely to think they needed protection, but the students who were taught stories wanted to protect the magpies.4
In fact, I imagine, they had started to love these birds. All because they’d been told a story.
I walk with my little girl and we tell our own kind of stories.
You know I think there’s probably a wise old owl in that tree… and maybe a squirrel too… Oh, look Jo, do you see those deer? I wonder where they’re going. Look at how fast they are, how high they jumped that fence. Is that a little bunny over there? Yes, just like Peter Rabbit. Do you hear that? Do you see those Geese in the sky? Where are they going do you think? Do you see they make a V?
One of my favorite things in winter is Night Check. It’s when I go down to the barn before bed, make sure everyone has enough hay, enough water. There is something deeply quiet and calm about a barn at night - a soft nicker in the dark, a shuffling of hooves, a gentle nudge across a stall door.
When it gets really cold in deep winter, I’ll likely need to bring hot water, change blankets, close barn doors. But for now, the nights are still mild, and I have time to look up at the sky.
So the night sky is also becoming familiar to me. I see the dysfunctional family of Greek Myth - Andromeda, Cassiopeia (the distinctive W), Perseus. And I know where to find Jupiter, bright and bold to the East. I know to look straight up to find the distinctive cross - Cygnus - the Swan flying overhead. I know where to find the triangle shape of Draco’s head and the little bear, Ursa Minor, won’t be far behind. I know to look toward the pines and up - there I’ll find Pegasus.
These stars will change with the seasons, they will shift with the light and half light of dawn and dusk, and I will notice these things slowly, as each night the world spins again, and again. The seasons become familiar in the constancy and repetition of their changes.
Again, the toddler says, Again, Again.
“What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
Again, again.
We walk to the sunflower field - a rather dreary sight in October. Glorious golden sunflowers now shriveled, brown, drooping.
Jo is confused. “Sunflowers?”
“They’ll come back,” my husband says, “Next year, they’ll come back.”
She walks up to a bent sunflower, pushes on the dried up stalk, “It’s coming back!” she shouts triumphantly.
In this moment, the gift of knowing the wild, growing, dying, blooming things becomes apparent to me.
For her, resurrection is entirely natural and completely unsurprising.
Familiar.
After all, this is the Story the world has told her.
Yes.
Where I first encountered this quote - the dreamy beach scene in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
Lots to appreciate here -- thank you -- but "[...] when our neighbors saw a skeleton display and thought, yes, this needs to hang from my tree [...]" prompted a good chortle!
I so loved this! And the bit about the night barn checks was my favorite!!