From October to May most mornings start for me with coaxing the fire in my woodstove back to life. If the coals flare with a little stirring, all I need to do is add wood; once I have the coffee made, I retreat to my study to sit before a screen. On mornings when the fire has burned down to ash, I start with kindling and eventually pull a chair close to the stove to read, one eye on my book and the other on the growing fire. My wife sometimes feels guilty that the ritual of coffee and fire falls mostly to me, but the truth is I have the better deal. The stovetop keeps my coffee hot, and the warmth is bliss.
Mornings don’t begin this peacefully for most people, nor did they for us for most of our lives. In the first years of our marriage, our days began with a sprint that lasted until dark. When we added children, mornings became more scramble than sprint, and we made parenting decisions on the fly. No dependable peace and quiet, no time for contemplation: someone had to make the lunches our kids would take to school.
Proximity to the woodstove is a handy emblem for this stage of my life. When I was young, heat seemed to come from within, and it drove me with a youthful sureness that today makes me scratch my head. Back then the future beckoned with exciting possibilities just over the horizon, waiting for my shaping hands. But how more complex everything would turn out to be! Today my heat comes from burning wood, and the thick contemplativeness that comes so easily sitting with coffee near a woodstove stays with me all day, whether I’m out for a run on a country road or cutting firewood with a snarling chainsaw far from the house. At the end of the day I can record the miles I’ve run and see in my mind’s eye a neat stack of logs to later split and dry, but what am I to do with all this thinking?
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. A little more than two decades ago my wife and I drove to Manhattan to celebrate my uncle’s 80th birthday. He was in remarkable health, and his wit sparkled. After a toast, he reflected on the ways his life had changed. Arthritic knees, he said, and now an unexpected pleasure in sleep. The part that really caught my attention was what he said about reading. It took longer now because his mind wandered, but he said this not with regret, but with amused curiosity. I, middle-aged and as a teacher needing to plow through a hundred pages a night to prepare for my classes, found his tone perplexing.
Now I get it. A few years ago I took an old copy of Moby Dick from my bookshelf and started in on what could have been my tenth reading. I ran up against the white whale first when I was in high school and a second time in college after I had taken some philosophy; then as a teacher I introduced the book to my own students, but never with much success. In this most recent reading, Melville spoke more clearly than ever, but finishing seemed to take forever. Inside my head ten versions of me wanted to argue about nearly every passage.
For me the flow of time has reversed. Not completely and certainly not literally, but so many of my thoughts are swept up in a receding tide that can whip me 30, 50 or 70 years into the past. This phenomenon would be terrible if my thoughts were rueful or sentimental (Cue Springsteen’s Glory Days), but they wander everywhere, creating what might generously be called context. I am the sum of everything I’ve experienced, of the people I’ve met and the books I’ve read; and that sum won’t stay quiet.
Not quite all my thoughts trend backwards. In my study sits a growing pile of seed catalogs, and soon I will be planning my garden. Every year I make small changes, some whimsical. A year ago at this time I was sketching a fence for a garden I had shared with foraging deer for forty years. My tradition was to plant pumpkins along the far edge and train their vines out onto the surrounding grass, but with a fence the garden I would lose this extra space. My solution was to plant seeds in my manure pile outside the fence, and by September I had more pumpkins than I could give away.
The real future belongs to proxies, my four grandchildren. To be there when the youngest graduates from high school, I will need to live to 97, a lot longer than either of my parents. It works better to not to project myself into their futures and instead see in the gleam in one’s eye, in the cadence of another’s voice an entrepreneur, a historian, a wildlife biologist and maybe a free-climber high on the wall of El Capitan.