A Final Summer Memory:
It’s usually around this time of year that I am overcome with a sense of melancholy. The frantic activity of the garden is done, and my perky sunflowers look like bedraggled, leaning giraffes, in a dance of death. The leaves are soggy in their fallen prevalence under the maple tree, never having had a chance to turn colors with the onset of an early frost.
Where is the color I love so much of red cherry tomatoes, bright orange pumpkins, green peppers and beans, or the dark purple eggplants–all gone in harvest? The garden has gone to bed. Birds no longer sing their songs, accompanying the trickle of water fountains, where they drink and bathe. Even the pesky squirrels’ chatter, which I thought I’d never miss, leaves a conspicuous silence. The only sound is the drip, drip, drip of the rain, and the occasional draft blowing leaves through the yard. Musky odors of mold and mildew pervade as nature works steadily to remove the remains of summer’s harvest.
And yet, there is the riotous beauty of the golden leaves left on my neighbor’s weeping birch. Farther down the street in my search for color, I’m entrusted with a brilliant maple whose crimson leaves still bear witness to their Maker’s beautiful artistry.
“God, You are still there, seen through our bright summer days, and even in the winter, when the focus turns inward. Even when the landscape becomes starkly black and white, You are there in our hearts, giving us the promise of life, new life, because the plant must die, before it can be renewed. Plants go to seed, and each spring, those same dismal-looking trees, plants, and bushes resurrect into live, green organisms.”
So too, in the seasons of our lives, we may experience an ebb and flow. The melancholy time may serve as quiet spaces in which we can reflect on thanksgiving for this year and future growth for the next season. It’s a time to look back and learn what God has taught us, the mistakes we’ve made, and how we can go somewhere else next year.
What will we plant next spring? How will we use the harvest God has given? Where will He take us?
“For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;” Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
Dianna
Sharing the Fruit of Maturity
