The Fifth Season

My first brush with the fifth season took place when I was four or five years old and on the cusp of learning to distinguish dreams from reality. There is that overlap which adults experience when waking from a dream. For a child of a certain age, it is not a moment but a condition, a temporary one but I guess it varies from one child to another.

I remember that I was alone in the back yard of a house still new to me. I’m pretty sure we had moved into it during the winter of that year. But the moment I remember is not n the winter.

There were mature trees in that yard: a magnificent hickory (which is still there) a giant Sumac, and then some maples and cherries. The buds on the maples were swollen, ready to break leaf. Looking at them I tried to determine whether the yellow flowers I half remembered from the previous year could possibly be the product of this urgent pregnancy.

Having learned, via the criticisms of my older brother and my parents, that I tended to be something of a dreamer, I corrected myself. That flowering of yellow could have nothing to do with the dark green of maple leaves I did remember from the summer before. And so I remember deciding that this fifth season, the flowering of the maples, was something too magical to be true and simply something I had dreamed.

This fifth season is by far the shortest, shorter even than a Vermont summer, and by a big margin. It follows on the laciness of burgeoning buds cast against the sky in the evening when the bare branches of trees seem to thicken and even to ramify. It lasts or two three days where I live now, the trees like clouds. Clouds of gold descending pregnant with green. On the hills yellow smoke. As lovely as A. E. Houseman’s cherry trees, and taking his advice, I pay close attention.

I am grateful for that childhood memory. It reminds me that we lose paradise not because it forsakes but because we grow used to it. We accept miracles of beauty having grown immune to them. Were there a mind mature and yet lacking these calluses, the sudden beauty of the earth would probably be too much for it, and leave it gasping and maybe even blinded as though it had stared at the sun or seenthe face of God.