I shall not let it escape through lack of diligence or through fear of the smiles of people in high windows.
Somewhere in this discarded machinery may lie the key to the secret. I shall be found puzzling over the saw teeth on the desiccated leg of a dead grasshopper or standing bemused in a brown sea of rusty stems. As I grow older and conserve my efforts, I shall give this season my final and undivided attention. It will return, but in the meantime there is an unparalleled opportunity to examine in sharp and beautiful angularity the shape of life without its disturbing muddle of juices and leaves. Do not be deceived simply because the life has flown out of them. The underlying apparatus, the hooks, needles, stalks, wires, suction cups, thin pipes, and iridescent bladders are all exposed in a gigantic dissection. In autumn one is not confused by activity and green leaves. Of late years, however, I have come to suspect that the mystery may just as well be solved in a carved and intricate seed case out of which the life has flown, as in the seed itself. They might say the proper time is spring, when one can consult the water rats or listen to little chirps under the stones. The things alive do not know the secret, and there may be those who would doubt the wisdom of coming out among discarded husks in the dead year to pursue such questions. A woolly-bear caterpillar hurries across a ledge, going late to some tremendous transformation, but about this he knows as little as I. The seeds remain very quiet and some slip off into the crevices of the rock. We, the seeds and I, climb another wall together and sit down to rest, while I consider the best way to search for the secret of life. After all, who am I to contend against such ingenuity? It is obvious that nature, or some part of it in the shape of these seeds, has intentions beyond this field and has made plans to travel with me.
A bit further I reach an unkempt field full of brown stalks and emptied seed pods.īy the time I get to the wood I am carrying all manner of seeds hooked in my coat or piercing my socks or sticking by ingenious devices to my shoestrings. I go carefully down the apartment steps and climb, instead of jump, over the wall. On some day when the leaves are red, or fallen, and just after the birds are gone, I put on my hat and an old jacket, and over the protests of my wife that I will catch cold, I start my search. I am middle-aged now, but in the autumn I always seek for it again hopefully.
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