The last few days have shown me that this winter promises to be very different.
Oh, not in the sense of what a “normal” winter here looks like, no; I mean that it will be very different from what I am used to on a personal level, blood and breath and bone.
I fell ill at this time last year, near-fatally so. And while it was the mildest winter in memory — not merely ours but virtually everyone alive today, an early manifestation of this year’s brutal drought — it was difficult for me in ways I’d never conceived. Heart and lung issues are complicated by cold, and I was utterly unprepared for just how much it would change my life.
At this early stage of the season, merely mid-autumn by the calendar’s reckoning, our days and nights are already near as cold as the depth of winter last year, a ferocious north wind ensuring that we do not forget our place.
I have learned perforce that I cannot do what I used to do. It’s a humbling experience.
But this is a time of enforced humility anyway: year’s end, death and dormancy, a time when the world betrays and spirits walk. It is, for us, a time of great beauty and joy, but also one of perhaps less nostalgia than a persistent melancholy. We cannot help but remember what was, both short- and long-term, and the insistence of memory reminds us of the inexorability of weather and time, of forces entirely outside our control.
I was reflecting on an aspect of this in the bright Saturday sunlight: Returning from errands in town, we passed this very field that sits along the main highway heading north out of town. It looks a bit different now, not in a way that anyone from outside would perceive, but altered in elemental ways that never escape our notice.
The small woods in the background remains more or less the same, at least in size and mass. The colors differ a bit, the drought having sent the leaves turning early this year, and now, the branches are disrobing similarly early. The small stand in the foreground, however, is something very different indeed . . . and yet, remarkably the same in essential aspects.
This image dates back some eight years or ten years, when the small stand remained intact. Parts of it technically dead, yes, but intact in the sense that it looked as it had for many years, the broken sentry in the foreground, the old warrior on the left behind it. In one of the years shortly thereafter, a spring windstorm felled the big warrior at long last, and part of the smaller one, too, taking out most of what remained and killing the rest.
Or so it appeared.
A few years after, a late-spring fire intended to clean the ditches got out of control, burning some of the undergrowth around it. And the following spring . . . the trees on the right came back to life. It seemed to be our own small miracle, because no had seriously questioned that the trees were dead — not dormant, not dying, but dead.
And today, they remain, their leaves now as golden-bronze as those in the photo, if perhaps more sparse.
The old warrior is gone; a few dead limbs remain upon the ground. But I did not choose today’s title casually: Memory is a persistent thing, as Dali knew, but also an insistent thing, demanding always that we remember.
The Day of All Souls is just past; even now, the spirits still walk. It’s why we leave food for them, and water, too, why some ring bells and offer prayers — to reassure them that they are not forgotten, to acknowledge their existence, once as relatives and now as ancestors. I has the effect, too, of forcing us to acknowledge our own mortality, a humbling experience if ever there was one.
But in our way, it is not only people who must be remembered. These old warriors, too, sentries for Mother Earth herself, must be honored. Memory insists that we acknowledge them.
~ Aji
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