THE BEGINNING AND THE END

       Way back in the early days of my farm wife life I would be asked out on ‘dates’ to go crop checking.  Please note that the quotation marks are around the word ‘dates’ and not around the phrase ‘crop checking’.  We were farmers genuinely going out to check our crops and truly it was as close we ever got to a date.

       Depending on what we were checking for, these dates took place at different times of the day; Wheat Midge was an early evening thing, Bertha Army Worm have an all-day-long window, Canola’s readiness check for swathing could happen any time, but a hot dry afternoon was best to grind heads of wheat out in our hands to see how far off harvest would be.

       My favourite times, though, were the crop emergence checks.  These were always done at either sunrise or sunset – my farmer explaining to me that this was when the light was just right to see the bright new green shoots against the rich, dark earth.  He was so right.  What was crystal clear in that first hour after dawn was nearly invisible at high noon but would show right back up just before night fall.  A trick in the intensity of the light and the angle of the shadow made the colours stand out, the landscape unforgettable and quite beautiful.

       It was this image of exquisite clarity that sprang to my mind while listening to the homily at a funeral I once attended.  The speaker compared a human life span to the duration of a day.  “Sunrise, sunset.” he offered, “Birth and death.”  His point wasn’t about the amount of time measured with clocks or calendars that either a single day or a lifetime took, but rather the intensity of focus we devote to the beginning and end of them.  How it was these singular moments at each end of a lifetime that humans seemed to devote the most attention to.

       “Just as when a baby is born, something comes to be that was never here before, and at death something is gone that will never be again” he pointed out, “just so no one dawn or dusk is exactly the same as another.”  He felt that it seemed irrelevant how long a person lived or what they accomplished in that life; it was at their birth we rejoiced most loudly and at their death that we mourned so deeply. 

       He went on speaking but by this time the memory of those early morning crop checks had filled my mind and I found myself wondering if this is why we examine life in much the same way.  At our dawn is the light just right to envision how much this tiny human might do in their lifetime?  And at our sunset do we not naturally take a look back along their row to see how well it grew?  I remembered how those brilliant green rows would fade with the high sun light and yet in the evening how they would be visible again.  Is that what happens to us in the middle of our lives?  Does what we do - how we live – disappear in our daily busy-ness?  A photographer once told me that there was no bad time to take a picture with our amazing prairie light, that the trick was just about taking the time to capture it properly.

       I love how serendipity works.  Within a day or two of this funeral I happened to read an essay written by a mother whose sons had grown and gone away.  She wrote her thoughts of their growing up years.  She had been diligent throughout their childhood building photo albums of all their milestones – birthday parties and sports events, Christmas mornings and Hallowe’en costumes – but now that they were gone she realized the things that she missed most, the memories that stood out, were the moments no one would ever think to take a camera out for.  Her list was very long and included things like lost teddy bear hunts, failed tooth fairy mornings, skinned knees and grass stains, having to share the last ice cream sandwich, homework woes, rained out holidays, a first brush with heartache, the didn’t-make-the-team milkshakes, the fine line of giving them space and still watching over them.  She now lived in a house where the fridge was full, the rooms were empty, and her photo albums didn’t begin to tell the story.

       My brain has sifted through this new perspective; I feel there’s a piece of wisdom in all of this to be learned and lived.  Maybe it’s this:  that no matter how beautiful or poignant the extreme ends of our days and lives are, the stretch in between – whether it be minutes, days, or years – needs to be captured and treasured in its own light.  Don’t think that each moment we have isn’t significant just because it’s hard to focus when the sun is high in the sky.