Notes from Maine - 2023/10/15

We have beautiful fall colors in Maine right now. Not at my house, but in Maine. My trees all dried up early and went straight from green to brown a few weeks ago. There are three big maple trees that line my driveway. They’re probably nearing the end of their lives. Up and down this road you can see other people’s maples dropping big limbs and splitting in two. And, of course, one of similar size died this year in my front yard. When I moved in, the inspector looked up at the chains that were installed on one of the trees, presumably trussing together two parts. 

“Looks like those will need to come down soon,” he said. That was twenty years ago. Maybe decades are “soon” when it comes to giant maples. That inspector was right about most other things, but I don’t think he was an arborist. 

This June, a family of raccoons was hiding out in one of the trees. At dusk, the mother would usher her babies up into a hole and stash them there while she went foraging. Afraid for their safety, I went out and yelled at her one evening. 

“This isn’t a good place for them. Dogs live here,” I said. She didn’t seem to care.

This summer, Maybelle (spotted draft horse) was pregnant for about six days. That’s the vet’s theory. She might be too old to keep a pregnancy at this point. Since I don’t have biographical information about her, I asked, “How old do you think she is?”

“Twenty,” the vet said.

Smiling, I reminded him, “That’s what you’ve said for three years running.”

He smiled back and said, “Twenty three, then.”

I heard a story on the radio the other day about the passage of time. We perceive time passing more slowly when novel things are occurring. If you’re repeating the same patterns, time will just fly by. So, as we age and we’ve experienced more things, life seems to accelerate. There are fewer things to be surprised by. Sometimes, that’s just fine by me. I’m in one of those cycles right now. I’m not that interested in living every moment to the fullest. A reasonable question to ask is, “Why?” Why does everything feel like a chore? I don’t have an answer.

When Maybelle was pregnant for those six days, it was exciting. I shouldn’t say it like that. I don’t really think that she was pregnant for six days. She and Earl jumped the schedule a little bit and then she was a week late on the next cycle—that’s all that happened. But it forced me to contemplate the next couple of years. We would have eleven months of pregnancy and then a new baby. There’s nothing more adorable than a little baby horse. 

The bicentennial was a big deal when I was a kid. The country was two-hundred years old—and that was an unimaginable length of time to me. It doesn’t seem that way anymore, of course. In the blink of an eye, I’ve experienced about 20% of this country’s lifespan. The house I’m sitting in has been around almost as long as Europeans have been in this area. In two-hundred more years, maybe this area will have transformed again. Maybe this house will have burned down—seems likely given some of wiring I’ve uncovered while remodeling the kitchen. It’s easy to think that my neighborhood will continue on just the way it is, since that’s the only way I’ve ever seen it. But in the bigger picture, this patch of land has mostly been a forest with some swamp grass down by the river. 

If I settle into a pattern—like really slip into a groove—I could blink and the world will be a different place. There were four billion people in the world back in 1976. We’re over eight billion now, and by 2076, there might be more than ten. Or there might be just a handful of people left. You never know. I bet these big maple trees won’t be around though. I have it on good authority that they will need to come down “soon.”