Fire in Late Autumn

His breath turned to steam in the early morning air

Leaves dressed in shades of yellow, red and orange

Fog rose from the warm earth round distant purple hills

And squirrels practiced acrobatics from oak and hickory

The child’s mind was full of wonder and the romance of beauty

He counted the zigzag stairs in the writing spider’s lair

He marveled at the graceful form of its delicate occupant

Such fine long legs extending from a yellow and black tuxedo

The old man had come to cut wood and he built a small fire

He sat near it now sharpening his instruments; the axe and the saw

His only remarks to the boy were on the swift change in climate

“It’ll be getting colder soon; another month or two, there’ll be snow”

The boy imagined soft powdery flakes drifting big as pennies

He thought of the cardinal perched among the crush of velvet white

Like a splotch of blood on the breast of a spotless dove; he saw it clear

The old man passed the child a sharpened hatchet to trim the limbs

The smaller twigs and branches went into the fire

The boy felt the grand weight of this tool of destruction

He was every pioneer of history; Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone

He had read about them in books; the old man only read his Bible

It was the same morning for these two; it was toil and adventure

It was the excitement of being trusted with something new

It was the burden of labor that had grown old and mundane with time

It was the warmth and beauty of the fire and the coming cold

The boy pondered the meanings of work and play

He had seen athletes exert tremendous energy in sport for enjoyment

He had seen broken men peel blisters from calloused hands

The latter seemed prisoners of circumstance forced of need

But if it were not mere exertion which determined the essence of an act

Then it must be that meaning had value in itself separate from labor

His young mind struggled to comprehend the difference

Sport, he determined, served no purpose other than enjoyment

So why did men dread their labor so; which produced an evident benefit?

Why did they not whoop and holler their enjoyment in expectation?

He glanced through the shifting kaleidoscope of colors as he hacked

He gathered the smaller branches into sheaves and tossed them into the fire.