Summer’s lease had only a handful of hours to go before reaching its official expiration, and signs were evident both in the garden and out that something had changed. Owing to the noticeably cooler evenings, the hostas and viburnams had bleached out, and only the prairie-toughened black-eyed Susans, rose sedums, and a few hardy Russian sage plants held on to provide what color will remain until the pageant fire of autumn begins in a couple of weeks.
In town, most of the tourists had vanished, and the retail price of a lobster roll sandwich, reflecting pure Keynesian economics of supply and demand, had dropped by nearly 25 percent. An even better indication of autumn’s incipient arrival was my wife Wendy’s formal switch from her summer straw to her winter cloth handbag.
The dawn redwood is among the oldest living things on earth, perhaps the actual oldest living species on earth if you don’t choose to count certain politicians and Hollywood actors, a “living fossil” dating back at least 50 million years and believed to be extinct for thousands of years until it was discovered growing wildly on a remote cliff in China in 1941. After years of wanting one, I was thrilled to find a baby dawn redwood marked down by half and waiting for adoption in remote corner of our local nursery center, where the owners seemed to be in as big a rush as I was to hit the road to Dixie.
The thing about taking responsibility for an ancient redwood is, you’ve got to give it proper space and plenty of room to grow, ample water and a few best wishes for a long and happy life. So I began by giving mine a proper name — Lilith, for Adam’s controversial first wife, the ancient fertile Mother of early agricultural tribes — and planted her directly out the kitchen door, where I can quietly keep an eye on her progress whenever I check in at home this winter. In another two or three hundred years, the way I figure, Lilith really ought to be something to see.
Delving in the Soul
As I planted my living fossil, I couldn’t get Mary Baard’s lovely sermon in church that morning out of my head. She was talking about the essential human need for creating “Sabbath” at a time of the calendar year when the pace of life actually seems to accelerate and thus tax both the flesh and spirit with a host of duties and family obligations.
In the ancient of days, to borrow a line from one of my favorite hymns, Sabbath simply meant to “observe a time of rest” away from toil and duty, to pause in order to try discerning the still quiet voice of the firmament within. It was the basis, oddly enough, for early tribal harvest celebrations that eventually led to our own observance of Thanksgiving.
“Sabbath,” Mary Baard said, “is simply a space we make in order to find ourselves and find God.”
Every man or woman, of course, observes Sabbath and finds God in his or her own peculiar way. Some go to church. Others go outlet shopping. Living fossils like me tend to go find almost any church with good preaching or an interesting garden plot within walking distance and duck in to dig in the soil and delve a bit in the soul.
Though I hail from a passionate mixed-breed family of Carolina Methodists and Southern Baptists, time and travel have made me something of a born-again Transcendental Episcopalian with Neo-Quaker leanings and serious horticultural tendencies. My Southern Baptist Grandma Taylor would either be very pleased or very worried.
Years ago, in any case, I realized I go to church and consort with the landscape for much the same reason — to briefly turn off the chatter of the demanding and visible world of duty and obligation to see if I can indeed get closer to God’s heart and hear some thoughtful voice whispering useful advice in my head. It’s a delicate balancing act, to be sure, one reason I’m at best still a practicing man of faith and gardening. Someday before the season permanently closes, I hope to get the balance about right.
A Taste of Sabbath
Now that it’s officially history, looking back on my own busy summer, beginning with the U.S. Open here and ending with my new dawn redwood there, while everybody else was busy kicking back and slowing down and maybe finding a little taste of Sabbath on their officially scheduled vacations, I managed to paint most of a house and built two new flower gardens.
I finished most of my latest book and ventured no farther from my hilltop than to visit my neighbor Ron’s farmyard, where he showed me his prize flock of turkeys, or to shuttle my two strapping teenagers to and from their pre-season field hockey and golf team practices. That schedule left me just enough time to take in a few minutes of Lou Dobbs before I fell asleep in the chair each evening.
The other day, before I set off to return to Southern Pines, Ron asked me to help load his 15 turkeys on a truck and send them off for their date with destiny, a turkey’s duty, I suppose, graciously inviting me to pick one out for our own Thanksgiving table down here. For whatever reason, perhaps because I’d looked those turkeys in the eye, I simply couldn’t do it.
Meanwhile, having reached the midway point of a Northern sporting season, my daughter Maggie’s field hockey team was visibly struggling with an official mark of 1-and-4, all narrow losses despite her own heroic play on defense. In saying goodbye, she promised to keep me up to date on her team’s quest to find a scoring offense and I promised to be on hand for the big finale against their cross-river rivals in mid-October.
Following his splendid high summer spent chasing the pill here in the Sandhills, son Jack improved his JV playing record to three wins and one loss. On my last afternoon in town, proof that you can sometimes find a little Sabbath where you least expect it, the disappointment of having a much anticipated match canceled due to rain from the same storm system that broke the drought here in Moore County also enabled us to have one final father-son round before I slipped out of town and joined the snowbird migration heading south.
He played well. I played in my gardening boots. I lost the match by one hole.
Nothing could have pleased this living fossil more, I must tell you. This joyful match — this unscheduled making of space to discern something — was as pure and welcome an indication of time’s passage as anything I’ve seen.
Until now, young Jack had never come close to beating his old man at his own game. Now I’m happily wondering if he’ll ever lose again.
‘So Little Empty Space’
And so I’m back here in Mrs. Cutler’s lovely log cottage on Highland. I’ll be hoofing off to church this Sabbath morning as you read this, wondering if I can somehow nurse the young hibiscus I foolishly planted before leaving in August back to life, still hearing Mary Baard’s sermon echoing in my head.
She ended her homily last week with a thought from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift From the Sea” that speaks to each of us here in the height of life’s busiest season:
“My life in Connecticut, I begin to realize, lacks this quality of significance and therefore of beauty, because there is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on; the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial that clutters our lives but the important as well.”
Late on the doorstep of my empty cottage Thursday night, I found a basket of end-of-summer tomatoes and a small note of welcome home from someone I should have gotten to know better this summer.
It’s nice to think my engagement pad is, for the moment at least, pretty wide open and empty and I can finally make the time and space to do just that.
Award-winning author Jim Dodson is spending a year with The Pilot as a writer-in-residence. He can be reached at jasdodson@earthlink.net.
