There’s more to a change in the seasons than the weather. From here in the Sunnymede neighborhood of South Bend I’m noticing the faculty parking lot full down at Adams High School. The school buses are learning their routes down at Jefferson School and we all need to slow down on the curve from Sample Street to Eddy.
Some healthy looking young men wearing football jerseys are again canvassing the neighborhood to raise money for the team. Judy and I always enjoy showing them our support. Tonight they open the season against a team from Hammond. That means a return of the parade across the way, down Wall Street on the way to School Field, with the team buses, and the grinning cheerleaders waving pom poms, and the band with the school song, and neighbors who say hello to one another as they gather to watch a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. Neighbors and a new season melt the cynicism of our age. What it evokes might be a feeling we forgot we have.
It’s funny how the present can seem like the permanent nature of things when of course we know better. When the drums begin to rise down the way it feels like a here that never goes away.
At the same time, in my 71st autumn, it never fails to surprise me when one season becomes the next. Summer, isn’t that the permanent nature of things? Some people in our lives are like the summer that will never go away. But it does.
I’m glad we have the seasons to remind us not to take things for granted, not to get stuck in our ways. I wouldn’t want to live someplace without seasons. I think of the poet Robert Frost, and the poem, “Birches.”
“Earth’s the right place for love,” Frost says, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Frost’s job was to make sense of the winter. We have that here to remind us our good fortune.
It’s good that when we come back around to the place we were a year ago to see something we recognize. That includes ourselves.
Seeing the Adams football players ambling sheepishly from door to door makes me smile. Like month of March crocuses along the side of the house, they have no idea. Big tough end of summer guys well worth the price of a coupon card that we will never use, represent hope for us.
“You guys gonna be good this year?”
“What position do you play?”
“Good luck.”
Always the same, they are, never growing old. It’s an inside joke that they’re a glimpse of our children coming home for a visit. That’s why they make us smile. They have no idea.
A week of cool weather makes it a good time, too, to take a walk down along the river, the trees along the south bank waiting for our return. Do you suppose we make them smile? We have no idea.
It’s funny to me, too, that when the next season comes we quickly forget the conditions we just timed out of. Next time at the river, on a day when the leaves have turned, my mind will say they’ve always been that way. Then, it’s winter again and I’ll forget that there is such a thing as orange colored trees.
It’s funny how the present can seem like the permanent nature of things when of course we know better.
I know covid has been on the rise again recently, but it’s nothing like it was in that scary time four and a half years ago when our bodies were piling up in morgue trucks and schools shut down. I see more complaints now about having to wear masks and get vaccinated than recollections about how awful that was and what we’d be willing to do the keep it from happening again. That’s what we wanted, though, to forget that mess. I suppose at the end of what my parents called “The War,” people began to remember how much they did not like rationing. “Was that really necessary?” they said.
It’s important to remember our history so that we learn to avoid trouble, but it’s nice, also, to move on from a long sad season to one where it seems like a lapse in our hopefulness never happened at all. Optimism. When it’s here it seems like it never went away.
Music: "Shiny Happy People" by R.E.M.
