by Thomas Roe
I
I love to come home to the East in Autumn,
To hills in flame and trees ablaze.
Too long a stay in out-West deserts and Texas plains
Makes me long for leaves in yellow, red, and gold,
For the seasons with their colors of more than blue sky and red dirt,
More blue sky and “hill” country barely worth the name
With scraggly mesquite that pass for trees,
Their leaves a dust-brown green.
I long to see the maple, the oak, the hickory with its shaggy bark
Rising up massive on hills that have watched the years unfold,
Seen farmland cut out, homesteads raised, churches built, and outlaws hung.
–All that’s happened out West too, I grant, but this is where our story is
And here the trees stand witness.
Some have been here across three hundred years,
Watched Goosepond Mountain, Lazy Hill,
Saw us come years before there was even talk of Independence,
Saw grandpa off the farm in ‘59, back when the state claimed it for their big
important plans
–so far the trees have stayed.
They stay and witness every passing year
And though from green to flame to gold they seem to flicker and to fade,
Their roots cling deep and clutch the land, unmoved.
II
My grandfather is old now, nigh on four score years and half a score again.
Never was one for many words –always self-conscious when the camera’s
around,
He grimaces a bit in the spotlight.
But when you catch him making a quiet jest,
Unremarked by others in a lively room,
And when he knows you know,
The twinkle still is there,
Hidden somewhere between the barely upturned corner of the mouth
And the wisps of gray hair that,
Boyish still at ninety,
Defy my grandmother’s attempts to keep them off his forehead.
III
Most afternoons he doesn’t make it far.
He watches from the middle cushion of the sofa
And now and then will pause to catch a wink or two.
In his eyes I think the world moves slowly
Without too much hurry and bother,
Though the decades slip back and forth into each other
As he looks out the window at trees slanting through afternoon light.
“There used to be a lot of big trees over on the Reeves farm…
Jenny Reeves had that farm over on the hill. We all thought they had it made.
But then the barn burned…”
I ask if that is when their farm went under. He nods and nods off once again.
So day goes down to dusk, golden boughs fading, soon unleaving.
We stoop, we shrink, the voice begins to quaver,
And the lip trembles when we move to speak.
And though the trees will stand to show generations and their heirs
another hundred autumns,
Not so barns, and men.
Husband, father, teacher, lover of old books. When not playing with his children or reading aloud to them, Thomas keeps busy inside restoring an old house and outside tending the fruit trees, berry bushes, chickens, and honey bees with his lovely wife on their ⅛ acre Eden.
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header image: “The John Coblentz Farm, Frederick County, Maryland, USA, and the surrounding Middletown Valley in early spring.” by Acroterion (cropped) CC BY-NC 2.0
