Lessons in Gratitude Day 492

How do we mark the passage of time? Is it through the change of seasons that we mark the movement from one to the next? What about those places that don’t have four distinct seasons? How do they mark the passage of time–perhaps by the length of the days? I’m aware of these questions as I am raking leaves in my yard for the second weekend in a row. The leaves falling from the trees and the sharp bite of cold in the air remind me that we are moving toward winter here in the East. But I am aware of another passage of time even as I stand here in my yard: the passage not only of one single season of winter, spring, summer, fall, but also the passage of years.

I watch my neighbor across the street. He too is raking his leaves and picking them up, but he has an assistant–a small boy, perhaps about 5 years old, whom I believe is his son. I notice after about 15 minutes that I no longer see the little boy rolling the yard waste trash dumpster from his back yard and, with a surprising show of strength for one so young, upending it sending the leaves tumbling into the pile they’d made in the front. Apparently his interest and attention on helping daddy with the leaf raking had waned and he was onto other things. I had to smile. It reminded me of many years ago when I lived in Michigan, of being outside raking leaves with my two children when they were 6 and 8 years old. They too quickly lost interest in the process of raking leaves, finding it much more interesting to throw them up in the air and dive into the piles until they even lost interest in that, going into the house and leaving me to finish the raking by myself. It was an odd bittersweet moment of recollection: the solitary, physically taxing work of raking nearly half an acre of leaves only, of course, to have them topple down several times more before the trees were bare or they were covered with snow.

Funny how those little flashbacks happen–the sights, sounds, and smells of autumn can propel me in an instant back years, decades, sometimes even to my own childhood. Today I was once again raking the leaves in a much smaller yard, with no company save the dog, whom I’d let be outside with me on her long lead. After a while I put her inside, finishing the work by myself. It was good work, and though I’d taken my iPod outside with me, I didn’t turn it on, preferring instead to be with my thoughts against the backdrop of falling leaves and the whooshing sound of the rake flinging them down toward the street.  There was a serenity in that process that I appreciated and when I was finished, I looked back over it all and it looked tidy and clean.

I am grateful for the seasons, for this particular way of marking time, the inexorable march through the weeks and months of the year, then from one year to the next. I continue to marvel that I’ve progressed through 55 five of them (years, I mean), yet still feel much as I did at 25. Of course I experience the inevitable slowing of everything even as time paradoxically speeds up, but internally I remain surprised to be cresting the hill and looking over at 60. (Half of my siblings are already there and beyond…) This thought takes me back to the lines from James Taylor’s “The Secret of Life,”

The march of time is inevitable, so as James says, “we might as well enjoy the ride.” I believe I already am.