sheets

I have put so many words to
paper over the years that I have
forgotten most of what I have
written. This is only exacerbated
by my real reluctance to go back
and re-read what I have written
for fear that I will find it wanting.
Nevertheless, I was cleaning out
the cellar yesterday and came
across a paper I had written in
college describing the leafing out
of trees and shrubs as "throwing
sheets over ghosts." It is not the
most penetratingly accurate
metaphor I've ever written, but it
does have a certain flow. In many
ways, autumn in New England is
the time when nature cleans out
her cellar, discarding all the
chewed, wind-tossed, threadbare
foliage of the growing season the
way we discard dusty, rusty
exercise equipment that once
seemed so promising. In winter I
am so impatient for warm
weather that I follow the slow
daily increase in day length as
though my life depended on it. But
by October I am frankly tired of
summer, which always comes as a
mild shock. I welcome the end of
summer and the fall of
innumerable leaves with the same
satisfaction I get from cleaning out
all the old files and cardboard
from my overcrowded
basement.What was a
dense,verdant, impenetrable

landscape becomes open again as the sheet of leaves falls away and reveals sky, rock and bare skeleton
trunks pockmarked with institutional green circles of lichen and deeper green felts of moss upon moss. My
cellar is quite roomy and neat for now, and so are the woods once the last of the oak leaves have paraglided
to earth. Winter is cold and bleak and desperately long, but at least there is a palpable simplicity to the
white and the gray: a pureness of form that is wasabi for the senses. By next March I will once again be
counting the minutes of sunlight and welcoming the first stirring insects and swelling buds - those same
buds that will bring a welcome sense of clutter and closeness to the gaunt, wide open spaces as we settle
back into the long short summer. I just wish I could have the same sense of welcome anticipation toward the
inevitable swell of basement clutter that I will surely face again by then.