Before the wind and rain took the last of the foliage
The leaves are off the trees, or most of them, anyway. What stands out now are the gold-hued Tamarack and the ever-shifting drama of the changeable sky. On a recent morning I drive the back roads, passing in short order a father and grown son ushering a small herd of Jersey cows into a bitten-down pasture; the two men are talking to one another, but my windows are up and I cannot hear their words, only their mouths moving, their hands gesticulating in the cool air. A mile or so later, I pass a mobile home with a large maple in the front yard; an engine – and a big one, at that – is hanging from a low, stout branch of the tree, like some outlandish piece of fruit. I feel an almost irresistible urge to stop my car. I want to give the engine a little push, watch it sway back-and-forth. How fun would that be? Not long after the engine, I happen upon the carcass of a large animal, surely bovine, dressed and skinned, hanging like the engine, but this time from a tractor bucket. The animal’s fat is yellow like the Tamaracks. That yellow is indicative of a dairy breed, something with high butterfat, maybe a Jersey, or a Guernsey.
Sometimes I think about how deep this place is embedded in me, how comfortable I am here, lulled by its sights and smells and sounds. Forty-seven years of them. Almost 48. Not quite old, but not quite young, either. And how much of me – or what I think of as me – is an incalculable sum of all these little parts.
Though mostly I don’t think of this. Mostly I just watch it unfurl along the roadsides. Mostly I just walk the forest. Split the wood. Stoke the fire. Waiting for the snow that is soon to come.
Ben Hewitt 