Equinox
I never knew my grandfather until he was dead. Today I do. He didn’t take his secrets with him. He left them for me. My name is Mallory Pingree.
The story I tell is a strange one. I find myself doubting what I know now to be true. I suppose as long as it made sense it didn’t matter. I simply needed to believe what I thought I knew.
I understand now the puzzle that was my life was missing pieces I was sure were there, but the picture I saw did not come together the way I had imagined. What I have, what I am left with, are pieces of a life scattered across the table that don’t fit my story. I realize now my journey could not have been revealed from the pieces of the puzzle I had, only from the empty spaces of the missing ones. It was what wasn’t there that held the adventure that was to come. What I knew, and what I had, did not matter. What I believed kept me from the world.
Fall here in northern New England is a coloring book scribbled in with crayon orange, yellow, and red. The world seems more alive at this time of year, filled in by the giddy promise of a child’s imagination. The sky sparkles a crisp azure blue that stretches out against rolling hillsides frosted like Turkish candy. The dark mantle of deep green on the shoulders of the high peaks is the only constant from seasons past.
These are old mountains, worn and braced against an endless sky and the ravages of time. Beyond the deepening notches, hidden between the mountain ridges, spindles of wood smoke rise lazily from the farmhouse chimneys announcing each village and hamlet. Across the hardscrabble fields a silent mist lifts from the head-water rivers of the Connecticut, Saco, and Androscoggin as they start their long journey to the sea. It is a time for gathering up, both a final flourish and a warning of the brace of winter storms that loom before us.
New England grit is born from this place. It is a stoic, rocky landscape, ancient and timeless, sometimes harsh, always hard. At this time of year, dazzled by the magic beauty of the autumn leaves and the bounty of nature’s harvest, it is a reminder of the assuredness of change and the coming darkness through which we must inevitably pass. This is where I was born and where I live. It is who I am.
I am not sure this isn’t my whole story. Not much of the rest of it makes much sense to me anymore. The past hovers like a flickering shadow, a whirr of movie frames from a made up life- a fiction I simply chose to believe from a script I did not write. What I hold onto, what remains, is my memory of an adventure made possible by what I didn’t know, didn’t have. What I didn’t believe.
We think things start at the beginning. They don’t. They start where they start. For me beginnings portend the end of something. The pursuit of some kind of bold design, some kind of meaning or purpose never really made sense to me. It sounds good in a book but life just doesn’t work that way, at least not for me.
In truth, I have been lost more often than not. The good thing is being lost urges you on. I’m not sure we can stop the inexorable, inevitability of our own movement. It’s what life demands of us. Yesterday is today’s lost opportunity. You can’t get it back. Tomorrow is little more than an expectation. What we do is move toward it. It is this burden of time that provides perhaps the best definition of faith.
Is my story true? It is for me. The truth lies within. It’s not somewhere else. I certainly cannot lay claim to yours. What I have learned, what my journey has taught me, is that sometimes the truth is best left unknown.
Mallory Pingree
Bethlehem, New Hampshire
