The View

FROM HEMINGWAYS ATTIC

 

Harvest Nights

by William E. Hazelgrove

"Don't be silly, life starts over in the fall," said Jordan Baker
in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. And so it does. The wood smoke is in the air and there is that peculiar crunching sound where one can hear the appoach of someone as if they were coming into your living room with those leaves breaking like a fine layer of potato chips. The trees are black against simmering red evenings and the moon is rolled out over vacant dry cornfields with the willowing husks rasping for no one. In the Midwest fall is the harvest season and we not farmers anymore sit on porches and watch that old moon and feel the briskness in the air and know that something has ended and something is beginning. Maybe it's that old agrarian cycle of going back to school after a long summer off and football is in the air and the last summer is past and there is so much life ahead again. The holidays are winding up and people are getting serious again and people are trying again and there is a sense that better things are ahead and even old man winter looms like a friend. The snows will come and the earth will sleep and the short days have already begun and maybe life will go on without us for a while until that spring fall rolls around again. I don't know. When I sit around on these harvest nights I feel I can reach through the pines to that ivory moon and I can grab all that youth again and feel a warm dog's main and I can run through that lantern light that only comes in the dusk of autumn and there's something precious out there, some future not yet seen and then there are all those years lived right behind it and still I sit on the porch behind the dry corn stalks left over from halloween and the Victorian homes have the yellow lights on and an old couple walks down the street not talking and their home is empty now of the children and a man mows his grass for the last time and you look for something of yourself out there but there is nothing again but the night passing and you've missed the fall once more and know these harvest nights will not come again for another year.