A Deep River Year 
August 27, 2014   

The last weekend of summer, just before the school buses start running, is always the Chester Fair.   The Fair Season in Connecticut runs from late August into October.   It is a lingering remnant of the agrarian communities that once flourished up and down our river valleys, where time was measured by planting and sowing, cultivating and harvest.  As the growing season came to an end, folks would gather to celebrate with food and music, displays of their produce and good-natured competition to prove who was the best in the land.

Now many of these fairs have become seasonal carnivals, with an emphasis on rides and midway games.    But our Chester Fair still has barns where a dwindling number of farmers bring their cattle and goats, where teams of enormous horses go against each other at pulling great sleds loaded with concrete blocks, where proud gardeners show off their finest vegetables and flowers, and where judges sample double-crust apple pies, chocolate cakes, jellies, jams, and pickles to give someone bragging rights in our small little corner of the world.   Yet this is serious business.  Years ago I knew a man who assured himself of winning a blue ribbon at the Fair by entering something that nobody else would think of entering, at least here in Connecticut:   he grew okra.  

Make no mistake:   I come to eat fried dough sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, maybe have a roasted ear of corn or a roll overflowing with sausage and peppers.   But always we find our way to the barns on the edge of the fairgrounds where farm kids are shearing their sheep and town kids are begging their parents to let them pick out a rabbit to take home as a pet.  This year we also headed over to the juvenile display area, where kids enter their favorite hobby collections and artwork.  There we found a prize-winning painting done by our extremely talented 12-year-old granddaughter, who also won a ribbon for her photograph of a marigold and a blue ribbon for her San Marzano plum tomatoes.  Bring on the fried dough!

Fair

The massive horses stand in shade,
snorting and tossing their heads
as they wait to be led up the dusty ring,
to heave together against a weary weight
as straw-hatted men sit in the bleachers
and shake their heads with respect.
A child steps to pat the nose
of one slick-maned, beauteous beast,
and the great thing pulls away,
as if it knows that this is not a day
for gentle gestures.
Today prizes will be lavished
on strutting roosters and pampered sheep,
on perfect tomatoes and prodigious dahlias,
on pies that look too good to eat,
and on some stomping, sweating team
of Percherons or Belgians.
But I would like just one old barn someplace
where the smell of roasting corn can drift and fill the air,
where a child could win a big blue ribbon
for kindness, or for joy,
where a funny-looking goat could earn a prize
just for being loved the most.

--Timothy Haut, August 27, 2014

A Deep River Year 
August 20, 2014   

 Now in the midst of August we are glad for simple, ordinary hours.   There are a few left this summer, days to savor sunlight and silence and a little time to sit and watch clouds drift by.   Henry James, a 19th century American philosopher, once observed that the two most beautiful words in the English language may be these:  "summer afternoon."    Those words should be spoken softly, almost dreamily, as if we were Mole and Rat in The Wind in the Willows, drifting down the river in their little boat, glad to be alive even for just a little while.

Of course it is possible to be content in the dead of winter, too.   But here, in Connecticut in these waning days of August, we dwell in a season of life that asks little of us.   No shoveling the walks, no heavy clothes to put on and take off, no stoking of the fire.   It is not necessary to hurry from the house to the car.   It is enough to mosey along, and sometimes just to stand there, bare feet in the grass, grateful for loveliness all around.    And this loveliness today is bright with color.

Winter is painted with a palate of gray and brown and white.   By February we are hungry for a world that is green, and the purples and reds displayed in the promises of the garden catalogs seem slightly lurid, almost erotic.   But here, in the heart of August, the zinnias and sunflowers are all joy.   Enormous scarlet and magenta dahlias and pink hibiscus line the garden fence.    And marigolds, bright as school buses, wave in the breeze.    What a gift to be surrounded by such color!  Dogs and cats and many other mammals, it is said, are somewhat color blind.   How sad for them!  Birds and butterflies see the colors we do, but ultraviolet light, too.   Watch a hummingbird flit from the scarlet runner beans to the purple butterfly bush, and you'll be a believer.   Listen carefully, and you may hear them whir by, singing "summer afternoon, summer afternoon!"

Summer Afternoon

Dream a summer afternoon
and save it
for some winter night
whose barren threads are loveless,
cold, and gray as death.
This dream will fill the thinnest air
with a perfume of marigold,
pungent as the warm earth,
and it will calm the whistling wind
with the drone of an August night,
the mysterious orchestra of insects
playing their sweet concerto while they can,
a love song under stars.
And there will be colors,
so gaudy and wild that we will laugh
and gather blazing bouquets
glorious as any hearthfire
to paint the walls of our sleeping.
And the bees will follow us,
drunk with pink and red and gold,
carrying their secrets to a place
where they will work their holy alchemy.
And this golden honey, given and kept,
will be for us a taste
of warm and lazy afternoons,
a luminous rainbow of a dream to feed us
until our summer comes again.

--Timothy Haut, August 20, 2014

A Deep River Year 
August 13, 2014   

The days are still full of summer, but the nights are telling us that things are changing.   The dusk settles upon us earlier now, and with it the loud songs of the cicadas and crickets and katydids, almost a din resounding from their hiding places in the woods around us.     To the insects themselves, this may be a love song.  But the lyrics I hear are these:  "Summer is ending  Summer is ending."   

This week has also been a time of celestial omens.   A bright perigee full moon, popularly known as a "Super Moon" because of its size,  has spilled its silver light over the August landscape just as the greatest meteor shower of the year--the Perseids--has arrived.     This happens each year in mid-August, as our small planet sweeps through the remnant of a comet's tail.     Some of that tail--particles of ice, rock, and space dust--burn up as they pass through earth's atmosphere.  We see them as "shooting stars" in the night.  Some scientists speculate that as we watch the streaks of fire across the sky, we might actually be seeing a replay of how water arrived on earth during the millenia of this strange blue planet's formation. 

Cosmic origins aside, these annual meteor showers signal that the arc of another year has turned toward autumn.  Monday we went out in the back yard and tipped back in our Adirondack chairs to watch the show  and to cherish for another moment the sweetness of a summer night.    With that moon shining, there weren't many meteors to see.  But one glorious streak of light did autograph our night,  reminding me of another summer.   My  sons were little boys then, and one August night on vacation we drove through a countryside devoid of street lights or shopping centers.  Along a quiet dirt road we pulled over and clambered onto a grassy embankment with a couple of blankets and stretched out on our backs to watch what most of the world was missing.   We said nothing to each other except for an occasional gasp or shout or giggle as the miracle unfolded.    Stars were in our eyes.

Shooting Stars

Nothing is fixed.
Everything changes.
The ancient stars
stretched across the heavens
have kept an order through the eons.
I was born to see what ancients saw:
a wondrous permanence,
the Great Dipper pointing to Polaris--
a guide to ships and sleepless wayfarers.
We have sought the stars for this,
like old Orion, hunting endlessly
for something that would stay.
And then on this moonlit August night,
even the steadfast stars seem to burn and fly,
like summer, like time,
like all we hold precious.
They flash before us for a moment,
leaving a gleaming trail across the darkness,
then are gone.
But there remains a memory to haunt us,
a signature of lingering light--
or perhaps a bright dream
of lying on a meadow's edge not so long ago
as crickets chirped a love song
and little children, watching stars rain fire,
made a silver wish.

--Timothy Haut, August 13. 2014

A Deep River Year
August 6, 2014
I  carried a walking stick with me this weekend.  It was a sturdy thing, hand-decorated by an Adirondack Mountain wood-carver many years ago.   Jim had used it year after year, and Friday the group of friends who had hiked with him over the years were heading up to New Hampshire once again to laugh and eat and enjoy the mountain air together.   Jim was 78 years old when he had the idea of inviting a group to join him on the trails of the White Mountains; and that year we loaded packs and clambered up to the rustic Zealand Falls Hut, situated on the edge of a waterfall.   It was cold and rainy, and we got wet, sore, and tired.   One of us almost fell off a ledge, and the streams were so swollen that a few members of the group had to strip down  and wade through the water carrying a bundle of their clothes over their heads.   It was wonderful.

We've been doing these annual hikes for 25 years now; and Jim kept coming, too, until he died a couple of years ago at age 99.   Lately we've taken to staying at slightly cushier lodgings (we like indoor plumbing and electricity to charge our phones, even if there is no cellular service deep in the mountains).  And some of us, who are as gray on top as the mountain summits, choose kinder and shorter trails for our adventures.    But we are still drawn to these magnificent places by the bond of friendship and a deep and primal desire to immerse ourselves for a while in the awesomeness of nature. 

We humans are drawn to mountains and seashores, to the brims of lakes and rivers, for our souls' sakes.  There we can stand at the edge of something vast and mysterious and look into endless distances.   We feel the surge and retreat of the deep waters that resonate with the very tides of our bodies.   We stand on mountain ridges and look down upon circling hawks and the minuteness of highways that dwindle like bloodless human arteries into the insignificance of our noisy and distracted lives.  In these places we find, if but for a moment, a peace.   Last weekend Jim's walking stick made it to the summit of Mt. Moosilauke.   I hope that Jim made it there, too.

Mountaintop

We stand in silence,
as close as we can get

to the edge of a great immensity.
We look out at endless ridges of stone,
or to the hidden thing just beyond the horizon.
We wait, unmoving,
held by wonder,
not so much humbled by our own small size
as enlarged by the girth and glory
of what is all around us.
We stay there
waiting to remember
what we have forgotten
in the rush of our exhausting days:
that we live among mountains
and listen to the pulse of oceans
in our bones and blood,
that we come to ancient rivers that beckon us
to greater waters than we have ever known.
We find some narrow trail
to take us to these sacred places,
find others who would go with us
to that reverence and quiet
where life is offered,
like a gift.

--Timothy Haut, August 6, 2014

A Deep River Year
 July 30, 2014   

 I have been watching this momentous change for several days. One or two of the swollen green tomatoes hanging near the garden fence looked like they were starting to blush a bit. I waited. Early this cool morning as I filled the bird feeders, I looked up to see an unmistakable bright red globe peeking out from the heavy green foliage. The first glorious tomato of the year! If there is a reason to grow a garden, this must be it.

 Of course I plant other things, too. I plant lettuce and peas as early as I can, just to be able to enjoy the first Spring produce after a long, cold winter. Then comes the procession of green beans and summer squash, Swiss chard and cucumbers. I just now see purple eggplants the size of golf balls promising something bigger and better in a few weeks. But a ripe tomato is the prize worth all the stiff muscles and sweat it takes to wish them into being from the time those little dry seeds are planted in March and the little seedlings are set under the basement lights.

 A tomato is more than a tomato, of course. Most of us get our share of tomatoes in salsa and spaghetti sauce and enjoy them immensely. My grandmother and mother both spent long hot summer afternoons peeling and chopping tomatoes and peppers and stirring them into immense pots of chili sauce, which were ladled into glass jars and boiled some more before being set aside in long rows on our cellar shelves in preparation for our winter tables. Out in the black soil of our Iowa garden, my father grew Beefsteaks and Big Boys and Rutgers Improved, long and sprawling, and one July afternoon he would wave me out to join him in the waist-high vines. He would bend down and twist a huge red fruit off and hand it to me, then pick one for himself. Together we would bite into those first tomatoes, and the warm juice would run down our chins and soak into our shirts as we shared a most simple and wonderful joy. Heaven will be like that, I think: a summer day, a mouthful of tomato, my father’s smile.

 First Tomato

 There are crickets chirping
 In the long afternoon,
 and the first katydids rehearsing
 their summer song.
 It is the incidental music,
 the score of these tender days,
 when a tomato waits
 for an old memory to ripen.
 It is there in the odor of earth,
 In the bright, musky scent of tomato leaves,
 when the fading sepia image of a tall man,
 sunburned, strong, T-shirted,
 reaches through the years
 for one red fruit.
 He bites into it, grins, looks up at me
 these decades later
 and hundreds of miles away
 from that sunny Iowa field
 where once I learned joy.
“There,” he says,
 somewhere close,
 "It’s for you.”

--Timothy Haut, July 30. 2014