Loud and Desperate

”Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ― Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau says that most men live lives of quiet desperation. At this point in the fall, my desperation is anything but quiet. The animals feel it too. We are racing the winter. The chipmunks are speeding around my patio chattering. The squirrels are running and grabbing and digging. And I am whirling and screaming and fretting.

I feel this desperate animal kind of clawing from the inside out. This clutching at time. The race to the winter. Or is it something more?!

Whole piles of laundry lie unwashed so that I can hit the trail and run through the woods. I go for three miles, and stay for five. The light is so different in the fall, and sends a halo of sorts over the already golden trees.

I breathe in the crispness of autumn, and the chill on my fingers subsides as I tick off the miles. I can see my breath. I run faster, racing the winter: one more corner to round, one more sunny day to inhale, one more colored leaf to follow as it flits to the earth.

The other day the leaves fell like rain. I grew giddy, running and playing the game my daughter plays with the neighbor girl, trying to catch the leaves before they fell. I didn’t manage to snag one, but it seemed as though the air buoyed ME as I ran, crunching the brown and gold at my feet.

I know well the things of winter: the early dark and frozen toes and silent earth. And the fall is a good time to struggle with dreams and intentions and songs before all are buried beneath the blanket of snow or tucked away under the comforter I use to keep warm when the dark comes too early.

And so I wrestle. I run. I jump in and pull back like my son in the pile of leaves on the curb. We both make a mess of things and grab the rake to start again. We laugh at squirrels who search for nuts and scamper up trees and bury treasures they will never find again. And we giggle and frolic and make treasures of our own before the winter buries us all.