nothing gold can stay

I’ve decided to ditch trying to catch up for a while on this blog.  Too much beauty is happening in the present.  I need to start being there.  Hazel taught me long ago that today is our happening page.  Catching up is a drag compared with living in the present. 

The world is on fire around here, bright and burnt reds and oranges and yellows everywhere you look.  I think it has been the most glorious fall I’ve known here, mostly because the weather has been sublime. 

On Monday we blew off all the homework and practicing mayhem that normally fills up our afternoons and broke loose into the cemetery and up through the enchanted forest all the way to Shumway peak (named by us).  We were out past sunset.  No one complained much (except for Emmeline who was very upset that she couldn’t find a plastic bag to put all of her sticks and stones and earthly treasures in).  

We went slow.  Stopped to drink in all the wonders of that perfectly golden October afternoon. 

We found a leaf jackpot and jumped and buried and crunched the leaves until our shirts were full of broken up dried leaves and half of our shoes were lost in the depths.

We hiked through the woods.  The trees in there sparkled with slanted, tired sunlight that looked as if it might catch those leaves on fire any minute.  We climbed up rocks and gathered sticks and stones and bottle caps.  At the top we looked over the wide expanse of Boston, all the way out to the sea, all painted in fiery color.  We blew the sun out as it sunk beneath the horizon.

Quite a few times as we walked I was tempted to check my phone, hurry home to make dinner, wish that I had invited friends to meet us there.  My to do list kept knocking, tugging at me to think about all that I should be doing.  I had to keep reminding myself to push away the life that keeps crowding out the real stuff and just be there, in that golden moment. 

Because, like Robert Frost points out, nothing gold can stay.  We just have to drink it in during it’s golden moment.   

Nothing Gold Can Stay

  by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,    Her hardest hue to hold.  Her early leaf's a flower;   But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief,  So dawn goes down to day.   Nothing gold can stay.