Sub Terra Vita #48: Autumn Introspect

Sub Terra Vita #48

For NormalcyMag

Volume 1, Number 3

September 18, 2017

Autumn Introspect

Autumn! I LOVE the fall, the twilight season to mark either a good year passing or the bad one about to finish. A new start to begin soon, but not before newer cool air comes in season. We see colors change in the tree leaves, far too quickly to appreciate them fully in their blazenings of reds, oranges, yellows. Those bizarrely beautiful combinations stun all.. The god paints on his canvas in Autumn. Yet, we never have patience in our crowded time of living to meditate on falling leaves, after the colors. At least not with as much patience as they deserve.

Falling leaves do not necessarily mean death or premonitions of death. Only a wrong appearance of death floats to the ground, as all but a very few trees continue living. Trees remain. Like life's burdens or things we collect, leaves fall from limbs because the living no longer need them. Whether deep pains or material things that we can shed like old skin, trees release their leaves in the windy cares of the world. And similar to the wisdoms we learned, leaves regenerate into the soil of the earth, and the leaves help nourish newer and fuller life. Leaves mulch and help growth for all other things, as well as the trees themselves. Even in the fall, as in other seasons, the essence of the trees remain and grow stronger. Like aging trees, even unto us, the added rings of age become as towering majestic statues of time. Oh, these mortal rings and coiled years! Let trees grow old, and we, too, but in strength not fragility.

For these things, I enjoy the Autumn. Fall, our last true breath of mild, warmer air until the vernals of the spring's release. But between fall and the spring, we have winter. Enjoy our autumns as we shall for winter brings cold light and chilling heaviness. Yet, even winter only lasts a short while. Fall! With the harvest of the earth, with a bounty of fun, with celebration, and with festival, we can make truly great times in Autumn. With some part of a lament, Time as the adjunct of our own space always lives, but ever forward. New times do come. Yet, we live to recapture the good ones in our new living season. Never, ever waste it. We can never make more time.

As from a mirror clearly, I see myself today. I can remember autumns of other years, and if I keep my life real today, I can keep my past real to me tomorrow, and despite a few remnants of sadness, I can carry mostly joys forward with me. But I remember, truly, one great memory of fall. One happy memory. I live it over in dreams sometimes, that memory about a game of playground football, a long time ago. . . .

Unforgetful in Autumn's Fields

Like all youth, I came from the impatient generation, growing up in Osceola. From kindergarten through sixth grade, my classmates and I started and finished elementary school in the same building where it remains today. I remember some of the notable highlights, besides learning the basics of the order, orthodoxy, and rigidity of society and our society's underwhelming expectations of young people, like then like now.

Of these various memories of youth, I remember one autumn day, in 4^th or 5^th grade, when my classmates and I dared to fly afield from the limits of school during recess, and we adventured to the “Holy Land,” to play a pick-up game on the practice field of the high school football team. In our eagerness, our impatience to break new frontiers, we tried the patience of Mrs. W., the playground supervisor. The usual attraction of the fast kid “lipping” off the slow kid, and the slow kid, never quite able to catch the fast kid, had failed in its luster. We had bored ourselves, with our playground surroundings—the pavement, the swings and slides, the monkey bars, and the sick-go-round, early enough in the school year. I felt that limits, boredom, and rules sickened my sense of purpose. I do not remember who said it, but someone suggested, “Hey, let's go up the hill to play football.” Time for fun.

The varsity football practice field, on the plateau of the Eighth Avenue hill, where Oak Court street now paves the Olympus of the gridiron titans, sat beyond our playground limits, south of our school, almost halfway to the high school and famous Oakey Park, down the other side of the hill. Of course, since we enjoyed only a short recess, we ran like Olympian sprinters up the “wagon path” between the forests of oaks and maples beginning their run to winter with the fall-bleeding of summer in orangish, yellow-red and brown-drab leaves, and past the rows of evergreen trees, quite young and new. We knew, but not really, that we broke the rules of school.

At the top of the slope, I remember my awe on that obscure dirt-flown grass turf. On the western side of the field, beyond the blocking sleds, stood tall the wooden monolith, the goalpost made from round timbers—two tall posts, with a cross post halfway to their top. We must have chosen teams of 5 or 6 boys apiece. And as most normally happened, I probably got picked last. We could only have played for 5 or no more than 10 minutes, and I don't remember if either team scored, before faintly hearing the recall bell. I remember running as a group, down the slope on that wide path between the trees. I do not remember if we ran there for recess again, but I do think we found ourselves in a little trouble.

Because it no longer exist, except in lore, like the games of Olympus, I dare call it a “forgotten field,” a secret of Osceola's “small values” past, quite unrequited a place in the history of the village. It became nothing more than a former football practice field, and later a playground, covered with houses in the change of time. But somethings do change, good and bad, even the triumphant spirit of impatience.

My classmates and I did something, far beyond the risks of punishment then. We exceeded our own limits of courage, in a way, something not done and not condoned in today's world, and for very good reasons no longer allowed to mischievous, though innocent kids. As I think now, of then, I smile at our defiance, our quest to adventure, to exceed just a little, the limits placed by order, orthodoxy, and rigidity. In 1980, or thereabouts, we could. We lived, we merry miscreants, we gang of rebels, to win our time, on lost playing fields of Osceola.