It’s Only Fair

Words ring as echoes from long ago when the year’s final harvest offered rooted stews for remembering.  Yet to enjoy, it required the pulling of tangled tendrils, strands clinging tenaciously earthward.

My aged grandfather, disintegrating yet further with every pull, tugged up the final resistance that day.  In his basket of potatoes, beets, turnips and a soft bed of kale, he laid the parsnip gently down, as if it might be the least he could do, ripping it from nature’s care as he did.  His arthritic hands pushed the disturbed soil back into place as if creating a burial of sorts.  That’s what I thought as a child.  When I asked him why he was so careful with the return of the uprooted soil, he said, “Returning the earth’s soul for another beginning…another seasonal lifetime.

 Like his words, there was something poetic about his Cherokee hair, sometimes pulled back in a ponytail, sometimes left to mix with his work, his sweat—even his tears.  I remember.  It was as dark as calligrapher’s ink, shiny as black agate.  And when there came a gust, like the mane of a wild steed, it would dance with the wind.  That’s how it was that last day of summer, when he stood erect; his sweaty skin a dark mirror beside the fire red oak and yellow leaf birches of summer’s end.  He sighed and blinked droplets of toil from his dust-weathered eyes upon the supper about to be prepared.

This was many years back, walking beside creaking knees bent forward as we strolled in silence, save the chanting of a quiet prayer of thanks he always left the garden with.  The shaman like sage, my grandfather, whose stories became my dreams at night, held my hand and we walked. 

I remember one time, we were stepping quietly and he bent wearily down and picked up a rotten peach. Inside a crazed worm squirmed in panic, the sticky amber juice of the fruit seeming to trap it, I think.  ‘Course I was a kid.  What did I know about suffering.  But he did something I never forgot.  He gently fingered the creature loose, bending his grating knees to carefully return the worm to the earth.  He whispered, “It’s only fair.”

Grandfather visits my loneliness—knows my dreams.  He visits often.  We make root-stew, his favorite.  Sometimes we watch the robins during early morning as they feast on worms.  “Actuality is short,” he cautions.  We nod.  “It’s only fair,” we say together.  “It’s only fair.”