To Autumn
He was drunk when I got there, bonded to the corner of his couch, leaning toward the end table where the only lamp in the room was on. He held a glass of bourbon in his hand, a single half-melted ice cube floated in it. This was not his first sip of the evening. Obviously.
It was late fall during my senior year of college in Maine, and it was chilly outside. Louis’s* wife let me in through the front door. I had my small collection of carpentry tools with me, yet I quickly surmised that I, we, would not be working that night. Louis asked his wife to get me a glass of Jack Daniels before he asked me if I even drank the stuff.
The only way to drink bourbon is neat, he managed to mumble. Or with a single ice cube.
As a student, I worked as a chemistry tutor in the Learning Assistance Center at the University under the direction of Louis. He was also a professor of literature, focusing on romanticism and transcendentalism, two areas of study where the writers often found their inspiration in Nature. Louis even looked like one of his literary heroes: Henry David Thoreau - a scraggly beard running along his jawline, perpetually unkempt hair weakly parted off to the side, and an intense gaze. The only physical difference between Louis and Thoreau was a little over 130 years. And Louis wore glasses.
He and his wife often lured me away from the greasy, deep-fried college cafeteria food for home-cooked meals at their house in exchange for me splitting and stacking firewood, or in this case, to help sheetrock their cellar.
Louis held his glass of Jack Daniels up to the light next to him. The bourbon’s color was warm golden-brown. This is the color of nature, Louis said. Then he spoke of the [corn] stubble plains. I recognized the words right away. He was slurring his way through part of To Autumn, a poem by John Keats. I had studied this poem in one of his classes.
I sipped the bourbon and felt that initial sting turn to a comfortable warmth inside my chest. After a few more sips, and listening to Louis’s ramblings, I finally understood. At that moment I truly grasped the soul of Nature through Keats’s imagery of the maturing sun, the swelled gourd and plump hazel shells of Autumn.
This one night has stayed with me for over forty years. It is with me every time I hike up through a wooded hillside rarely travelled by anyone now, to visit a slowly dying witness tree, at least 250-years-old, that I befriended many years ago; it is with me when I watch dragonflies patrol their hunting paths along a hedgerow at sunset, or listen to tree frogs on a balmy night; and it is with me when I pour myself a dram of that golden-brown bourbon and imagine I am back with Louis agreeing that the only way to drink this is neat. Or with a single ice cube.
* I changed his name because it seemed to be the thing to do - protect the guilty and all that stuff...