Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 3, 1994 TAG: 9410040014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCh
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The groundhog who lives in our fence row has grown so fat that when he tries to move across the field, he lumbers. He trudges, he plods, he waddles, he trundles. When the time comes, he'll fit so snugly into his burrow's keep that he'll scarcely have room to take a deep breath in there.
Not that he'll need to. My book about groundhogs calls their hibernation "unyielding torpor." Torpid, if you ask me, characterizes groundhogs very well year-round.
Earlier this week, I saw a young deer in the front yard trying to figure out how to cross over our barbed wire fence.
Imagine that. A deer not knowing how to jump a fence! She nosed around like a dog, apparently wondering if maybe she couldn't scoot under that lowest strand.
Finally, she wandered out of sight. Still on my side of the fence. She's too naive to survive the season, I fear.
For the woods are opening. Leaves drift off trees singly and by the handful, filling the path, filling the already bare branches of the understory. I see horizons and patches of sky through groves that have, all summer, been as dense as walls.
Golden, golden. It seems everything in the woods and the yard is gilding itself.
Except, of course, for the squirrels. Who are much too busy to stop for any such nonsense.
And the turkeys. Who've been parading around, strutting their stuff, clucking at one another, disturbing the cat.
Here's that time of year that for generations, for ages, even, we've called the year's end. That time of year to mark completions, to celebrate harvests, to assess the outcome of months of work.
But, schooled as I've been on the academic year, autumn still feels like just the beginning to me. I greet these chilly nights, these short open days, as starting signals. Buckle down, they tell me. Get moving. Get going. Prepare to burn the midnight oil.
The industry of squirrels, the summonses of turkeys - these are my autumn. No unyielding groundhog torpor for me!
When the leaves begin to loose their hold, I buy new pencils and sheaves of pristine paper. I shake out my sweaters and think about new shoes.
But these are, of course, nostalgic activities. I'm years and years away from school.
When I was in grade school, my grandfather often drove me to school. He worked there, too, you see. I was unimpressed; totally unaware of what it meant that my grandfather was the county's superintendent. He was just my ride. And the sweetest grandfather in the world.
One fall, after I'd grown, he picked up a brochure for me about improved woodstoves. They were newfangled contraptions at the time, and he was worried that I would get too cold in the old house where I lived.
"It used to be," he said when he gave me the flyer, "that you smelled wood smoke on the air all the time. Now, if you smell it, you wonder what's on fire."
That was more than 20 years ago. And now, once again, wood smoke fills the winter air. Every fall, when I catch the first whiff, my grandfather comes back to me, offering his love.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB