MindSpinner

Outside in the water garden (a large flowerpot, planted halfway into the ground, low-budget, DIY-style), the two goldfish look cold. They rise slowly, rather than swim up, to eat the papery orange flakes I feed them. I’ll have to dig up their pot and move them indoors soon. The Knockout Roses bloom yet, but their bodacious show of fuschia on green is a matter of days at best.

The season of the garden turns to the season of the hearth. It stirs different longings. These longings do not include checking yearbook pages and working the fall festival this weekend.

When the trees are all undressed and shivering in their bare limb bones outside, analogously it seems as if all life’s elements are more starkly rendered - our need for light, for warmth, for simple food served hot, for nearness through the night, for books and blankets and something hot to sip, for giving, for singing, for sleep come early.

There’s another kind of winter that lays bare the structure of a life, its strength or its brittleness, its beauty or its flaws, its skyward reach or brokenness, or both. I know a tree not only by its leaf or bloom, but also by its silhouette against a winter sky, by how it takes the ice and wind, and bows and stands again - or splits. At my mother’s last year, a great oak fell. At its base, its girth must have been fifteen feet; its trunk was as hollow as a drum.

Wandering through blogs and Web sites today, as is my half hour’s decompression ritual after school, I happened across Jack Beatty’s political essay in The Atlantic, entitled “Blame Character.” In it Beatty explores George W. Bush’s character as the source of his destiny (not to mention ours, at present) and asserts what seems obvious - that we might readily have predicted the course of Bush’s presidency from what we knew all along about his life. Beatty reminds us of the Greek concept of character, the one we see writ into classical tragedy and the characters of Faulkner (etc., etc.):

“Charackter” is a Greek coinage meaning “to engrave”—referring to the power of early experiences to shape later life. Character, for the Greeks, was destiny. What you did you would do. Your past predicted your future.

I think of the seedlings growing now in my back yard, my someday shade. As I shape them, they will grow, and it is very likely the structure and strength they attain early on that will determine, in concert with weather and time and perhaps disease or pestilence, their destiny when they are 50-foot trees. Weather and time will discover them.

So weather and time discover us, too, lay us bare, strip all the pretty leaves of our words and personas and aspirations away to reveal lives that can bend without breaking, stand in storm, thrive after winter, or else fail because we are stubborn and brittle or diseased or simply weakly made.

It seems especially sad that the fall of a hollow tree with a great girth is not only the tree’s destiny but also the destiny of everything that lies helpless in the path of its fall.