Column 9 Published in the August 25 Warroad Pioneer
The Shift occurred a week or so back. I was out walking the gravel roads, and for the first time in months felt the tiniest bit under-dressed and a keen desire to rush home and curl up with a good book. I love how subtle it can be some years. And I love how it announces itself with exclamation points other years. The nights are colder now. The dew seems heavier and of ill intent to our rain-stunted garden. The fast-growing trees are losing their first leaves and a back-to-school buzz floats on the winds of summer’s-end.
The hardier fisherman have arrived. The partiers and the raucous atmosphere they lend to our lives have mostly gone back to the default world. And all around the Angle, the fall prep work begins. We’re like squirrels gathering our acorns with a sense of urgency that wasn’t there mere days ago.
We’re watching new driveways take shape, and the well diggers have been here for weeks now, boring new access ports down to the iron-rich waters that feed this place. The spotted fawns, while still gangly legged and dependent, seem more confident and curious.
My first fall here four years ago, I reveled in the manual labor that seemed to me to define this lifestyle. Having just left a corporate desk job, commuting by aluminum fishing boat with a 25 horse tiller engine to move a woodpile on a Bear River homestead was the ultimate in mindful worship.
I remember walking the tree-lined streets of Seattle practicing awareness with purpose, with presence. One would think it would be so much easier here amidst the stillness, amidst the slow intentional way people live their lives here, without the push of in-your-face consumerism, without the traffic and the harried commuters. We have one 3-way stop on our Angle roads. Only once in my four years here have I witnessed three vehicles pulling up at it simultaneously. Each of us laughed and waved in disbelief, seeing it for the anomaly that it was.
Now I practice mindfulness with toddler in tow. We stop to move the still squirming mortally-wounded garter snakes from the road so they may die in the quiet of the grasses. We count the geese when they gather on our driveway. We name the bird calls. We loot the garden. We sing each step up to the top of the one-room schoolhouse playground structure.
We make-up songs of doing chores and cooking meals, and the bedtime stories she requests of late are about deer and frogs. “The baby deer don’t live with their papa,” she quietly pointed out to me as we watched a mama and her twins cross the road in front of us.
Each season is one of change, but the coming of fall has a distinct and perceptible air of necessary death. The arms of the woods will yield once more to our traipsing about, and I hope I can loosen my mind in the crunch of the leaves. I hope.
A Goulet and a Butler youngster head south to college. The newest generation amasses a few more with the arrival of the Carlson Schoen littles, the Anderson’s and hopefully the Edman’s soon. The Colson boys are alive and well after a close call with a vehicle and a black bear. My youngest brother and family are home from a three-year station in South Korea, and his wife and three children will be temporary residents for a short time. School teacher Mrs. LaMie will be as busy as a queen bee and that play structure will feel a lot of love.
If I had to choose, the fall is the most beautiful time of year at the Angle. Winter can crust the world over in harsh temper and hard tasks, if I’m not mindful, if I’m not seeing the beauty in a slumbering world. But for now, a few more fall marshmallow roasts, a few more pleasure cruises on the cooling lake, a few more weeks of harvesting and canning and then the idyllic slow season will be upon us.
Suddenly, it will be fall.
Kellie Knight’s “Angle Full of Grace” 