Late August, and I feel a sense of impermanence. As my 60^thbirthday nears, this sense becomes more sharp, an aching joy to be alive as I and everything around me changes, transforms, slips away. Riding my bicycle along Lochside Trail to work I note the rusty tinge of autumn on the leaves and grasses and the mist hovering over Swan Lake in the mornings. Sweet fruity smell of ripe blackberries blows at me in waves, and I stop sometimes to pick a few. Many fall to the ground, uneaten, wasted.  Seamus Heaney wrote about picking blackberries as a child, the hunger for these ripe jewels:

“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. . . .”

But then, that lust turns to disappointment:

“We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.”

These last few weeks I feel the passing of time, nothing is fixed or stable, nothing keeps. At the University where I work, I sat at a table in the Student Union Building, slowly sipping my coffee, and a man, his white hair tied back in a scraggly ponytail, approached. He was looking at the bulletin board beside me.  His eyes homed in on a notice for a missing person—Gladys Barman, in her 80s, had disappeared some weeks before. The photo showed a healthy-looking old woman with short white hair and glasses, her clear face smiling broadly. The man reached out and carefully removed the notice, pulling out each pushpin and folding the paper, placing it gently in his pocket.  Just a couple of days before, the remains of a body, not yet identified, but suspected to be Barman, had been found 11 km. from her car.  Although his eyes never contacted mine, I felt I shared something with him when he removed the copy of her joyful face from the board: someone you love is no longer in the world.

And then there was the yard sale. I was riding my bike to Fabricland, and what should I happen upon—but a huge fabric sale laid out in the front yard of a house in the neighbourhood. What synchronicity! Six long tables spilled over with fabric. Several women bustled around, tidying stacks of cotton and flannel.  Plastic bins overflowed with scraps, a pile of unfinished quilting projects towered, bags of quilt batting were tucked under the long tables. Signs everywhere: “$5 a metre – no cutting – fill a bag of scraps for $5.” A gaunt woman in a wheelchair was parked in the middle of it all, directing the bustling women: “I don’t want a scrap of fabric coming back into the house!” Behind her, a run-down rancher mirrored her looks, bedraggled and tired, its shrouded windows like sad, downcast eyes. I took advantage of the “bag of scraps” offer, grazing over the bits of colourful cottons, listening to the talk swirling around me.  These plump bustling women were her sisters; she had had heart trouble, could no longer sew, and was confined to the wheelchair. As I examined a half-finished Hallowe’en quilt, dug into mounds of coloured scraps, looking for treasures, I thought of all the hope embedded here, sewn into every seam, every purchase. She thought she had ample time—all the time in the world—to finish all of these projects and more.  But all we have is  borrowed time.

Knowing my time here is only borrowed wakes me up. Yeats’s poem, “Vacillation,” contains a stanza that has been my favourite for the last 15 years because it celebrates the simple bliss of reaching middle age, of just being here:

“My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”

Like Yeats, I have sat in a café, nursing a coffee, reading a book. I, too, have looked up at the world and felt the searing joy of being present, alive, blessed, even capable of blessing.

The disappointment comes in believing any of it will last—the freshness of the berry, my health, energy to sew or write, my memory, my ability to read, to walk briskly, to get to Gorgeous Coffee on my own—all of it will go. Unless, of course, I go first. So here’s to now. here’s to impermanence.  Here’s to the ripe berry and to the rat-grey fungus. Here’s to aging and to great happiness. Here’s to the bitter and to the sweet.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50981/blackberry-picking

http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/yeatspoems/Vacillation