Unleaving

To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

The word “unleaving” came to me, oddly, I thought, with the full moon setting through the thinnest curtain of leaves not yet opening here in northern Michigan.  Hopkins writes of a child’s innate sense of mortality, grieving over the falling of leaves.  I woke up this morning in surprising synchronicity with the campus where I spent the 44 ends-of-April prior to this one.    I put on the teakettle and decided to stroll in the spring moonlight along our quiet street here in northern Michigan.  The last few robins were singing the sun up with songs not quite pure enough to have attracted mates, while their red-breasted Pavarottis were sleeping in, mated.  Their songs sounded sweet to me; I thought of myself as a kid, last to be chosen on the backyard baseball teams.  Reverie having joined me on my stroll, I realized that at the university, the unleaving is beginning, the students falling from the stairwells and doorways, blowing from the sidewalks, being carted off in cars and vans and some, even, U-Haul trucks, as the end of final exams approaches.   

This was always a melancholy time for me, especially in those last few years when I considered, like Margaret in Hopkins’ poem, my own departure from that nest that had shaped me.   Still on e-mail there, I watch the general announcements.  Sister Beth Finster is at her post, one last cookie table outside Campus Ministry, picking up money to support the service trip to Jamaica that starts next week, the first week of leisure.  Fr. Jerry Cavanagh and Dr. Mary Lou Caspers will pile a group of students into a university van and drive to Shenandoah for their annual backpacking trip.  The campus will smell of fresh mulch and flash with dots of color, flower beds filled by staffers who spent a morning of their work day this week getting the campus ready for another graduation ceremony.  I wonder if my friend Ken Henold will weep and know why, looking back as I do at his life spent there and  preparing to retire in a couple of months.  And I wonder too how G-Stock, Fr. Gerry Stockhausen feels, stepping down as president, moving on after leaving it all on the court, a game well played for ten years

I’m at leisure now, packing for a drive to Chicago to see my siblings…because I can.  Oddly it seems, I greet this little trip like going on vacation, vacation from this retirement that began a year ago.  I seem to be clinging to the tree, reluctant to participate in this great unleaving.  I think of myself as part of the factory, where things are produced.  Generally by these closing lines of the daily blog, I come to some conclusion, some discovery, some revelation.  But this morning I guess I’m just standing here, like Margaret, and this unleaving goes on. 

All of this reverie was prompted by my wondering, on that stroll, whether I would blog while we’re on our five-day trip to Chicago.  I dunno.  If you don’t see anything new for a few days, know that it’s just that I’ve closed the factory and gone fishing.  I’m gone, but not leaving.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.