Week 12Fall Week 12
The day breaks with little help from birds.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
To walk in any well-managed forest during December is to confront the inevitability of death.
This is the month of blank, lowering skies, when the last of the leaves lift and drift into a drizzly wind. Seasonal cues aren’t always reliable in this changing climate, when heat so often clings through the fall, and I feared there would be no color at all this year. I was wrong. The sugar maples went golden at last, though not in October. This year they glowed against gray November skies, each leaf giving off its own light.
The understory at the park has died back now, and the contours of the land are evident once more. In December I can see the places where rainwater flows downhill to find Otter Creek, then the Little Harpeth River, and someday—winding through the Mississippi River watershed—the Gulf of Mexico. In summer, the forest keeps the journey of rainwater a secret, tucks it away under a tangle of green, just as it keeps hidden all the songbird nests that are so visible now against a pewter sky.
The birds themselves have largely fallen silent, their summertime music giving way to sharper calls of warning whenever a hawk is near. The hawks are always hunting on these cloudy days when they can fly without casting a shadow, but the chipmunks hear the blue jays’ warning jeer and take note. They stand upright, their forefeet clutched to their chests, to take up the cry. Soon the quiet trees are echoing with an unearthly sound that always seems far too loud to have emerged from chipmunk lips.
A late autumn drizzle transforms the woods into an astonishment, but almost everything else about this time of year feels mournful to me. Perhaps because this is the season when my father’s cancer stopped responding to treatment, and when, a decade later, my beloved mother-in-law entered hospice care. Perhaps it is only because I am growing older myself. I feel the throb of time more acutely with every passing autumn.
One year that feeling was complicated by a routine medical screening. As I waited for the doctor to call with the pathology report that would clarify whether our long family history of cancer had finally caught up with me, I looked up the preliminary diagnosis online and scared myself to death. I mentioned this turn of events in an email to a friend who would understand—she is my age, and she had just lost her mother to their own family history of sudden cardiac arrest. “I feel like I’ve reached the age when I have to make friends with death,” she wrote back. “I want to cultivate more of my mother’s fearless embrace of death, though I’m not at all sure how to go about that.”
I think about her words as I walk each day through this sepia world of autumn. I think, too, of the poet John Keats, whose odes were so bound up in the evanescent nature of time, “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life. I know what he meant when he wrote that “to think is to be full of sorrow / And leaden-eyed despairs.”
I have not yet found my way to being “half in love with easeful Death,” as Keats was. When my doctor called to say the biopsy had come back with no sign of malignancy, relief swept through me like a high autumn wind. Never mind that such news is only ever a reprieve.
Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be. The misty rain unstiffens deadwood, making places for nesting woodpeckers to excavate next spring. I can stop to count the rings of shelf fungi on a dead tree and know how long they have been growing, how long the death of the tree has been feeding the life of the forest.
So much life springs from all this death that to spend time in the woods is also to contemplate immortality. On the way out of the park I passed a red-tailed hawk lying at the base of a power pole, apparently electrocuted, its perfect wing extended in death. The vultures were already beginning to circle as I passed. I drove on, knowing what would come next, what always comes next: death to life, earth to air, wing to wing.
December reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.