Streams of Mercy

Fall is here, bringing the last of this year’s peaches and the first of this year’s apples and cooler days, with leaves turning their true colors and beginning to fall.

When I was a little girl, one year I tried to “save the leaves!” I found an old tin box with a lid and set about collecting the colorful leaves falling all around us in that little mountain town. When I had “saved” enough, I poured water in the tin to keep them – or so I thought. I put the tin in a shelf in the garage and told them to “wait for Spring.” When I checked on them right before Thanksgiving, I could see only black sludge, and I in my child-like way began to understand that “for everything there is a season.” If only I’d had the book, “The Fall of Freddie the Leaf” to guide me at this time in my life!

Anyway, this memory has led me down a path through many beautiful poems by Robert Frost.

“Nothing Gold Can Stay”

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 … Nothing gold can stay.

Frost is saying that nothing good or precious can last forever by using nature and The Garden of Eden as metaphors for cycles of life and death and the loss of innocence.

That led me to another old favorite:

“The Mending Wall”

“Something there is that does not love a wall ...”

Two neighbors meet annually to inspect and repair their shared wall. They walk the length of it, each one on “his side” of the wall. Their meeting contrasts two approaches to life and human relationships. There are gaps and openings in the walls, left intentionally – perhaps an opportunity to form a stronger connection? Other questions come to mind: What are we walling in and what are we walling out? Do good fences (walls) really make good neighbors?

And another “old favorite:

“Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

to watch his woods fill up with snow …

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The poet has a lot to achieve in life before his comes to an end. He’s taking time to enjoy in the moment the quiet beauty of the world around him and to reflect as he continues on life’s journey.

And one last old favorite:

“The Road Not Taken”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood …

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by.

And that has made all the difference.

The two roads that the poet-traveler faces in his journey are symbolic of the choices that we encounter in our lives. He decided to take the “road-less- traveled,” accepting its challenges and uncertainties.

I’m grateful for times like this that help me remember and celebrate other seasons of life. These poems were “pure gold” to me as an English major at Centre College. And to think that this journey down memory lane came from remembering a little girl in the mountains who tried to save the leaves.

Elizabeth