I was driving home…yes plain-old-ordinary driving home…with these thoughts simmering in my mind. I thought of what a nice beginning that would be for a really good sit-by-the-fire story; and then remembered how much easier it is to begin a tale than end it, even as “The end of a thing is better than its beginning.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8) For all the books ever written, there must be a thousand that languish in closets in a perpetual state of infancy.
Between the covers of a story, that stand out in ripples of poetry, lie the facts in lines of prose. Here, while the colors of autumn flame and fade, the wood must be chopped and stacked, the last chickens processed, the last grass clinging to living green must be cut, the last fruit gathered.
Already the last of the apples, excluded from regimental rows of cans stored away, are just beginning to wrinkle with age in bushel baskets. Our pumpkins sport wooden stems cured from once-juicy slips of vine. The tomato plants are officially spent; resulting in a blending of emotions for those of us who reveled in the treat of fresh tomatoes all summer and survived the late nights and soggy hands of the sixty-quart canning season. The diminishing “side-table” in our family room is reestablished to its former height with new bags of wheat. It probably comes as no surprise that we decorate with our bulk food-supplies. In any case, once the stack is leveled with a board and draped with tanned deer-hides, it truly makes a lovely buffet...really. The only drawback I can discover to edible furnishings is the perpetual fluctuation in size.
Our table groans under bounty of a different kind than heretofore. Mountains of potato salads and fresh salsas, and heaping bowls of cherry tomatoes give place to pots of hearty chili and savory soup and steaming stacks of cornbread with vegetables from the frozen regions of the freezer.Autumn is in the lane that leads home now. The bird-songs will trill on a chilled and shortened tune when the wind blows with ice on his breath. The door to the old year is just around the corner. Very soon it will close, but the wonder of living is the privilege of leaving the old behind and walking on into the time on the other side of the door.
In this sense, a tale never really ends. I am beginning to think the best “end” to a story must be a closed door, with mystery and promise of the nameless future behind it, since it tacitly forbids the mortal reader to look past the threshold of time into the awesome knowledge of eternity; a thing which none of us can really do…yet.
