Favorite Columnist: Verlyn Klinkenborg

Horticulturists say that a good wind firms up a young tree’s root hold, and that’s also a way to think of the fall season.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/opinion/14sat4.html

November 14, 2009

THE RURAL LIFE Root Hold

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

This time of year, I nearly come to terms with entropy.

The grass has stopped growing, and so has the wild mint and spotted touch-me-knot. The snow hasn’t begun to fall. Most of the firewood is stacked, as is the hay. The thistle-down has blown, milkweed ditto.

The leaves are down. That’s about as organized as it gets around here. For a few weeks in midautumn, I feel as though I can see the farm plain. I get a clear picture of what needs doing, and I rediscover the simple pleasure of doing those things one at a time.

A rubber feed pan needs moving from the chicken yard to the barn. I walk it down, and it stays put. In summer, every object on this place gravitates freely from place to place. Every morning, I get up and everything is everywhere else. That feeling goes away when fall comes.

Fall is the season of staying put, except for the leaves. There was a wet, sloppy, dousing of snow the other night, heavy as a deep depression. The dogs and I looked at it regretfully, as if the darkness were growing even thicker as the snow fell. But that, too, is the beauty of this time of year.

Darkness can only get so dark, so deep. What it does get is longer, and yet even that’s good news. We’ve already been there in the past — in the long dark of December, the deep chill of January. This is not some galaxy we’ve never visited before.

As the snow melted the next morning, I found myself wondering how it all feels to the striped-bark maple I planted a decade ago. Its leaves were among the first to fall, but now its twigs are stark with dull ruby buds. They are poised for a season I can’t quite imagine yet.

It’s tempting to believe that all of that maple’s strength has swollen precariously in those buds, but it hasn’t. It’s deep underground, rooted in the equilibrium of earth itself.

Horticulturists say that a good wind just firms up a young tree’s root hold, and that’s how I’ll think of this season.

Here in the clarity of fall — before the weather gathers and snow climbs up and down the storm — I look for ways of increasing the order in life, firming a root hold I too seldom feel.