Wednesday’s Writer’s Almanac featured a poem by Bruce Taylor entitled “Middle-Aged Men, Leaning.” It begins:

They lean on rakes.
It’s late, it is evening
already inside their houses.

The children are gone.
Their wives are on the phone
talking softly to someone else.

This frost, this early Fall
upon their minds, a small
measure of patience and regard

as if the twilight world
in bright papery pieces
diminished so and thus.

It caught my attention because my fingers and palms are still sore from all the yard work we did last weekend; yard work that had me leaning on rakes and shovels as well as standing on ladders, wrangling in brush piles and wrestling with awnings. It was a lot of hard, dirty work but we were blessed with an extended stretch of early September at the end of October, giving us the time we desperately needed to get the yard ready to host the Mall Diva’s upcoming nuptials in the spring.

While Tiger Lilly, my wife and I worked on the gardens the Mall Diva and Ben cleared out the four flower beds in front of the house and planted tulip bulbs, happy in the thought of the rewards for their labor regardless of whatever hardships and depradations should be visited upon these by the winter, the squirrels or the administration.

A long, cold season may be ahead but there’s so much promise on the other side of it. I’ve lived through many a winter now and quite a few temporal seasons of hope and change — some of which even almost worked. I take any and all forecasts with as many grains of salt as I’ll eventually pour on my sidewalk in the months ahead, but one thing I know for certain is that the head of my government has decreed that seedtime and harvest shall not cease as long as the earth remains.

bookmark to: