Sommelier

The color overhead has moved to beneath our feet now, a wave of yellows, oranges and browns tumbled over by the wind as the tide shifts to winter. Fall is quick. It is a verb, a golden movement from up to down in a slow, silent spiral. We take a walk on the Bruce Trail in two spots, one along Rockway Falls, and one next to Janey’s house with her family. Dawnelle’s take on the look is “Dead, dead, dead.” Robert’s is, “Look at all that firewood.”  As for me, I’m just glad to be out walking in this carpet of leaves while it is still warm enough to stay outside this long. Robert keeps wanting to turn back because he knows better than I do how quickly I tire, but I want to keep going. It’s good medicine being out here.

The Bruce Trail runs all along the Escarpment (the cliff down which Niagara Falls) and is named after an earl. It is the longest and oldest marked hiking trail in Canada, and travels through woods,  past waterfalls, over roads, and along people’s lawns and corn fields, a 900 km kaleidoscope. We admire the details: a stark white mushroom on the bottom of a tree trunk, a pine burl, a shimmering pool. What I think about is this: it’s not just humans who use love languages. You know the five—giving gifts, saying affirming words, showing affection, serving, spending quality time. I am fortunate to have a husband skilled in all of them. But God has his five love languages, too.

Sight. I think of the ways He delights us with contrasts. Among the brown leaves starting to show their skeletons, there is one bright yellow leaf still whole. The white mushroom against the brown bark draws my eye. Robert says his mom would collect these tough woody creatures and paint their back with scenery. The smoothness of the pool contrasts with the tumbled leaves and bare, tangled branches between us.

Sound. The dry leaves rustle as the miniature waterfall murmurs steadily in the background, soothing. It too is a child of the fall, its water making a shimmering curtain down over the rocks, passing on that hurricane water we had last week.

Feel. The cold rocks are covered with brown crunchy leaves and a fur of bright green moss. Choose the texture you like, and you’ll find it somewhere here. The contrast is refreshing. Everything God makes invites you to explore further. Ok, except scorpions. And even those, someone like my student Ember would delight in studying.

Smell. Look. A baby evergreen coming up among all these adult deciduous trees. Bright green against all the brown. I think of Christmas trees just hauled in from fields, bringing their smell inside with them. Did you know that smell is the only sense directly connected to your long term memory? How many Christmas trees did you just remember? It’s the only sense that gets more sensitive with age. The best taste testers are old.

Taste. I am not eating anything out here on the Bruce Trail (I wait to pick an apple fallen off the tree in Janey’s front yard), but other creatures are busy eating. One trunk looks like it has become a feast, and all around me the decay makes it possible for spring to come again. Death into life, a lesson of redemption. I eat an innocent apple fallen from a tree in the garden, and I know, in contrast to the imagery, that it is a gift, one of God’s love languages to me. Remember the song, "He fills up my senses?" God fills my senses with good things; my youth is renewed like the eagles. I am a sommelier of God’s goodness, ever more experienced.