An Afternoon

The back door slams and you call ‘sorry’ over your shoulder, running across the cold old grass of a backyard behind a brown farmhouse standing crouched with age in the lee of the hill. A hill covered with trees in shades of autumn, maples flaming orange and yellow in the dull of an overcast November day. You run fast enough that you cannot be expected to hear anyone calling you back for the never-ending list of chores. Today, pail in hand, is the right day for this task in the late ancient part of the year.

The air has a sharp tang of end of season, enough bite to make your nose run.  A complex toasted scent of leaves rises from the fallen layers underfoot. The sun peeps past an edge of cloud, then a thick gray draws in again. A flurry of crows rise calling against the sky. Passing warm and cold currents of air trade turns pushing against you as you mount the hill into the orchard and head down the long slope between the harvested apple trees, each naked tree twisted and shaped by its individual history of spring rains and summer drought, squirrels and the voices of the men come to pick in early fall telling stories over sandwiches.

A bit over two miles from the farmhouse a forest waits, its edge of beech trees and conifers, old maples clustered with the patchy leaf hues of yellow and orange bright against dark green clumps of pine and juniper. A path, nearly invisible, leads between ponderous trunks, and a squirrel knocks twigs as he flees, scolding. You can see how the faint signs of foot wear run alongside then over the tumbled granite boulders of a wall some other long ago farm grew. A mile more, perhaps, though it always feels a longer distance through trees on a ragged path, before you turn down, following the descent of the tree-thronged land. Before you now the forest changes, opening to the sky and standing gray; most of the leaves in this area have fallen and there’s only a scatter of swamp maple red and pink, echoing the lower cast sprinkle of bright blueberry leaves.

            The ground is no longer dead leaves and earth, but confused bare brush and twigs catching your feet. This is where you leave the path, you must pick your way through and around the gray trunked maples, which as you progress, grow thin. Few branches reach overhead now. The brush seems more like deep lichen, and your feet sink, the footing becoming more awkward as though its softness pulls. Here in the autumn bog, trees are few and those around you seem young, as though something in this place forbade any of them growing past a certain age.

 The very light feels different, pale, the colors alien and lavender hazed. Yet looking around, you are in the open, so why does this secret place feel so very magically strange? Watching you, as though it has been waiting for someone to come.

You see the first dark red gleaming, kneel down and gently tug the first cranberry into your grasp. You squint, peering around. Then in a flicker, the cranberries seem suddenly numerous as though that first sighting gifted you with the trick of seeing them. All shades of pink and cream and dark dried-blood vermillion. This is why you have come, and as you kneel and gather, tugging the round firm berries from their filamentous moorings, the wet of the bog hidden under all the ages of layered moss slowly seeps through your stout jeans. The very birds seem silenced, and there is only a low murmur of wind, and the rattle of the berries gathering in your metal pail.

Your great uncle brought you here ten years ago, to gather Thanksgiving cranberries. It was a secret, he said. This was our own bog, not enough to harvest for sale, but enough for a family. Inside the purple-gray bowl of sphagnum, a man stays hidden from the rest of the world, even from a hunter out for his family’s deer. The moss underfoot and under knee, might be hundreds of years old, or thousands. Perhaps the Indians of this area, the Abanaki, had come here as you do. Likely enough, he said, nodding.

He died years ago, but you remember the way. It’s a slow pick, to gather enough cranberries for a sauce, but when you pause and feel the November air on your face, and feel the deep dank chill of the bog on your legs and hands, it could take forever and would still seem right. This place with its mysteries could enfold a person and hold them away from the world. How would you know that minutes changed and moved while you stood here?

You whisper, because this is a place for whispers. Gray whispers that might move not only through the air but through time itself, and bring one of those rare smiles to his furrowed face.

“Uncle Ben. I came. Happy Thanksgiving.”