A Deep River Year
January 15, 2014

This week we have enjoyed a January thaw here in Connecticut.  The snow is almost gone, except on the edges of streets and parking lots where it had been plowed into piles not too long ago.  There has been a softness in the air, and we have been able to walk outside just a little slower now that the bitter arctic cold has left us for a while.   The old New England farmers never relaxed on a nice day, of course.    They learned to expect that storm and troubles were always just around the corner, and that it was a good idea to prepare yourself for them.

But I am not an old Yankee farmer.  I will take these days with gratitude, even though I know that there is a lot more of winter yet to come.   So I wander through my back yard, and up into the woods, where the bare bones of the landscape show themselves most clearly in winter.  And walking back toward the house I notice that the melting snow has revealed again all the tasks which were unfinished last fall.    The yard is covered with wet, matted leaves that I never got around to raking up.    The garden is a mess of skeletal flower and vegetable stalks.   Over in one corner a covey of plastic pink flamingos lean against the face, and the pole of prayer flags that wave brightly in the wind on a spring day has drooped into the mud.  A gazing ball over by the barn is off its perch, nestled in the stubble underneath the lilacs.

And up by the terrace, where the yard backs up to the woods, are two metal chairs that threaten to be obscured by overgrown forsythia.    Nobody has sat in them, probably for years.    They are rusty and need paint, but they sit there, together, like an old married couple looking out over the debris and remnants of their lives.    From this vantage point, I look down a gentle hill toward the house and garden, and beyond the fence and across the street to the white Congregational Church.   I can remember, from here, my now grown-up children playing wiffle ball and hide-and-seek, and I can see other faces, some long gone, looking at the world from this very place.    I can see myself here, too, all of those years--a life passing in this same metal chair.    And I wonder, too, who will sit in the empty chairs of my life in whatever years remain.

The Empty Chairs

The chairs are empty
out there near the edge of the woods,
under the bare trees
which give no shade
from winter's spare and fractious light.
I should have dragged them away,
warehoused them for a season
in the dusty barn loft
or in a basement corner
where they would sit in the dark
waiting for the grass to green again.
But I like them there, among the wet leaves,
rusted and empty.
Ghosts of the past sit there,
and I wait, and wonder,
about who may yet come
into this yard, this life,
to fill these empty spaces.
It is not a good place to sit, now,
even in this January thaw
which has exposed the unkempt garden,
the broken remnants of marigolds
and sunflower heads, hanging limply,
colorless as the cold earth.
Once my father sat here, though,
looking out at the climbing peas
and beyond, to the roses,
as a white cloud bloomed overhead
in the bluest sky.

--Timothy Haut, January 15, 2014