A Good Autumn

Jimmy’s boy came by again.

He’s been coming every day now– sometimes with the Artful Dodger, sometimes with Sparkles the Disaster Cat, sometimes with a new child who wanted to see the garden. I’ve learned to have bread and peanut butter ready when school lets out.

This time, the boy was carrying a long metal stick that looked like part of a window sash. “See this? It’s like a machete! I can use it to cut leaves!”

“Good, because I’ve got some horrible maple saplings growing flush against the house,” I said. “You can cut them down for me.”

I love maple trees in nature. If had a much bigger property, I’d love a stately maple tree I could tap for sugar. But I do not like maples that undermine the foundation of my house. Two of the maples have gotten so thick they’re eating into the porch and gutter; the landlord’s handyman will cut them down when he doesn’t forget.  I also have a myriad of tiny maple saplings growing flush against the house and the porch, which block out anything I want to plant there and grow back year after year. I showed Jimmy’s boy where they were, and he set to work.

“I got sent back to Kindergarten,” he said, using that stick to whack at the leaves. “But this time I’ll get through it quick because I did it before!”

“You were having trouble with your grades?” I asked.

“I can’t read yet, and there’s also math.”

“You’ll catch up. You’re very clever. Tell me what you know. Do you know your ABC’s?”

The boy sang his ABC’s as he hacked away at the weeds. When he finished, I looked down at the despised maple tree sapling, and realized that he’d neatly cut off every single leaf.

“You’ve just done me a huge favor. Now I’m going to cut the rest of those maples down so they won’t eat my whole house!”

I went inside to get the clippers, the great big murderous-looking hand clippers that could get through such thick green wood. When I came out, Jimmy’s boy reached for them.

I hesitated. “These are so sharp they could take your hand off.”

“I can do it!”

“Well… all right. Don’t touch the blades, just hold them by the rubber handles. This is the real deal, grown-up tools.” I handed them off.

Jimmy’s boy lopped off every single branch of the maple with a surgeon’s precision, then chopped the whole thing down to a stump. With me following him, he went around the outside of the house, chopping maple after maple until all but the big fat ones the landlord’s handyman will have to remove were stumps. He was much better at using the clippers than I was.

After that, I said I wanted to put another portion of the planter to bed with cardboard overtop of it, but I didn’t have any more bricks to weigh the cardboard down.

“I have bricks!” said Jimmy’s boy.

“Now, don’t go taking other people’s bricks!” I cautioned as I ran after him, but he wasn’t.

I followed the boy all the way to his “clubhouse,” where he and the Artful Dodger store all the treasures they’d found abandoned in the alley. It’s actually the foundation of a torn-down  garage in the vacant lot. There were all kinds of things in the clubhouse: bits of old window sashes, sparkling fragments of shatter glass, empty plastic bottles, and a stack of broken slabs of brick and cinder block.

Jimmy’s boy cautioned me not to disturb a little teepee framework of sticks at one end of the clubhouse.  “The Artful Dodger is building that in case we get nuclear bombed.” He knelt to fill his hoodie with the bricks, just the right size for the garden.

We took the bricks back, and put the cardboard down on that nuisance of a planter in front of the porch. “I’m going to plant grapes and blackberries here,” I told him. “Grapes take a few years to give fruit. We won’t get any grapes next year, but by the time you go to the middle school you can go and pick them.”

“I’ll put them in my lunch!” Jimmy’s boy fussed over the bricks and cardboard, overlapping the ends so that no weeds were left uncovered– again, much more precisely than I had done, just as he’d outdone me trimming the trees.

“Now, about Kindergarten. Would you like to come inside and practice with a book?”

Yes, he’d like to come in. We got Adrienne’s stack of old children’s books off the bottom shelf in the dining room. I felt that twinge of grief once more, that I’d never be a homeschooling mother again, but I didn’t let it show.

“This is the easiest one,” I said, opening the book on the sofa. “You read a bit to me, and then I’ll read you something funny. Give it a try. P-u-p, what does that say?”

Jimmy’s boy recited the letters. “pee-you-pee.”

“No, sound them out. What do they say?”

“Puh-uh-puh. Pup!”

“Right, and this is C-u-p! Sound it out!”

“Cuh-hup, cup?”

“Good! Cup, pup, pup in cup! Now they mixed it up, what does that say?”

“Puh-up, Cuh-up…”

“Cup on pup! You’ve got it!”

He lasted for two more Doctor Seuss vignettes, and then I read to him from Roscoe Riley Rules while he colored with Adrienne’s old art supplies. When I finished, I admired his drawings: a jack o’lantern with a toothy grin, a haunted house with a spooky tree, a bag overflowing with candy, a skeleton with fourteen ribs.

“You’re a genius,” I told him, and I meant it. “You have such attention to detail. You could be an artist or a farmer when you grow up.”

I’m surely not the first person to say that every child, indeed every human being, is a genius. It’s only a matter of finding what they’re talented at doing, and building it from there.

I am, of course, not the One Who said that if you welcome a child, you welcome Christ Himself. And I must admit, I feel much closer to God lately. It’s much better than it used to be.

It’s been a very good Autumn.