Die Jahrzeit

It’s interesting to think about solitude in the country. A walk in the morning when the cool air carries expectancy and birdsong.

Sunlight drifts through limbs still barely past sparse winter and mostly what I feel is peace. It’s the peace of nature behaving according to seasonal conditions and improved by the rare absence of mechanical sounds.

I’m wondering if this is an experience we require in our souls for a balanced life.

Or is it a commodity? Five years ago, the pandemic dribbled to a close. Solitude then was a vigil. I lived suspended, held to what I had considered reality by a thin cord of breath—my husband’s as he lay by our window in hospice care.

For respite those days I would go to our woods. In every season, the woods are full of life and also death that does not hide itself, that does not mark only the end of something, someone, beloved.

Broken limbs become the host for mosses and small insects and fungi. Falling leaves naturally crumble into a new generation of dirt beneath your feet. The smell is one of regeneration.

The five years that followed his death are both a long time and an instant. Five years of feeling every moment of absence moves glacially. Forty years of happiness is a flash.

Somewhere in between is the pace of change around us. We came here because of love for dark skies spangled with bright stars; coyotes’ goblin chorus; the nightly susurrus of crickets and other insects; rabbits bouncing in the grass, birds everywhere, filling the crystalline air with music.

The only machine noise came from a neighbor’s tractor. And there was plenty water because it was respected by the people who lived here. Even those of us coming from Houston respected the local way of doing things.

Do you remember the friendly wave from a passing pickup on county roads? Remember how the verges of those roads leading into Round Top would be pristine the morning after an event?

Perhaps it’s inevitable that we ruin what we love. Leon Hale wrote about our place in his newspaper column. Thousands of Houstonians sat with him on our front porch, rode with him into town. And some of them began to visit the area.

The antique show had just begun to grow. More people came. More and more.

Developers followed. Development is a strange word because the process often has more to do with destruction than generation. And the moneyblinded focus of speculative development is among the shortest and least aware of any in our civilization.

It seems illogical to kill the qualities that make an area appealing.

Replacing what’s relaxed and pretty with oversize and other constructions that are ugly, cluttered and frenetic makes no sense unless you’re looking at returns on investment over a relatively short period. The short period of fashion that continues to shrink in this age of Influencers.

Among the inhabitants of the woods time feels unrelated to the seasons of a corporation’s balance sheet. Unrelated, also, to the concept of human legacy and how we “are remembered” for most of us won’t be, past the living memories of our children and a generation of grandchildren (if we are lucky).

The memory we leave behind is ephemeral, more fragile than the wings of a butterfly. And the towns inflated by greed into grandiosity will deflate just as fast.

What endures longer (if we let it) is the land and the longlived trees resetting themselves according to season despite the vagaries of climate and human myopia.

Leon Hale died on March 27, 2021.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com.