I am remembering now the Sunday afternoons of my 1960s childhood, after my wiggling self has been set free from church and from the interminability of Sunday dinner, after the leftovers have been covered in foil for picking at come supper time. I feel again the loneliness that descends after my grandparents have packed up and started toward home, or my own family has packed up and started toward ours. I remember the hushed hours when the adults in my house, and in all the houses I know, have stretched out for a nap. Hours of Sunday stillness and Sunday quiet lie before me.
It was hardly a cause for grief to have been left to my own devices, and yet I can’t recall a time that felt more universally bereft to me than those Sunday hours just before sundown, when the light stretched into long shadows, and the shadows hinted of hidden sorrows.
People did not think to entertain their offspring in those days, or supervise their games, or shepherd them from one enriching activity to another. At least people in Lower Alabama did not. School afternoons were joyful, free from the tyranny of bells and adult interference. We raced on roller skates through the pine-splintered light. We waded in the creek, the warm water just beginning to cool in the lowering sun. We wandered the woods or the neighborhood with no particular plan, just to see what fascination might reveal itself or what friends might spill forth with an idea for something to do.
Supper would come with darkness. Homework would follow supper. But school day afternoons were busy with child-made pleasures.
Surely there were interesting Sunday afternoons, too — why wouldn’t there have been, with so much freedom in a shimmering world? — but I can’t recall a single one. In memory, the desolation of Sunday afternoon was complete. I don’t know where all the other children were, or how my own brother, the dearest playmate of my childhood, has kept himself so resolutely out of these Sunday memories. Perhaps he was napping, too, or had found solitary projects to immerse himself in. It’s possible that my brother might have been beside me, as he nearly always was, and is only hidden now in time’s shadow. A memory from nearly six decades ago is surely unreliable.
Still, I persist in remembering myself as a wakeful child in a place where everyone else was sleeping, a restless child drifting alone through a radiance that poured out of the sky and settled into every crevice of the world. That shining world could make me catch my breath with wonder and at the same time fill me with a melancholy that to this day I can’t entirely name.
There were reasons, even then, for a bone-deep sadness, far deeper than the usual going-to-ground of November. Already our bird and insect populations were plummeting. Our oceans were filling up with plastic. Our forests were falling to axes and backhoes. Our rivers were being tapped dry. Even then we were drenching everything, ourselves and every living thing within our reach, with poison. I just didn’t know it then.
Decades later, most people still don’t seem to know it. Those of us who do wander the living world wracked with grief.
And that’s what makes the lovely loneliness of a winding-down season its own kind of gift. I am grateful when I feel the old melancholy in the same way I could feel it as a child. The ordinary sorrow for tightly furled buds still so far from opening into flowers. The ordinary absences of birdsong and butterflies and front-stoop skinks and plodding box turtles and sharp-eyed chipmunks with their warning chock chock chock that breaks the silence when a Cooper’s hawk is flying.
It’s impossible not to feel the silence of Sunday afternoons today exactly as I felt it then. The birds are mostly quiet now, but I know when a hawk has won the hunt, even if I never see the hawk, because at least one squirrel will set up a keening at its neighbor’s death. Hardly anything is lonelier on a quiet Sunday afternoon in autumn than the sound of grief pouring down from an otherwise silent tree.
Night comes earlier in November — a whole hour earlier, as of yesterday — but it comes more quietly now, nearly devoid of song. The cicadas and the katydids are gone. The crickets, fewer now than only a month ago, have not adjusted their volume to fill the gaps left by their brothers and sisters of the wing-song multitudes, but the silence is otherwise so huge that their own songs seem to swell. I can hear them from inside the house, even with the windows closed.
The brown marmorated stink bugs keep trying to move indoors, seeking shelter from a cold that has not yet come. When they fly, they buzz in a way that makes me think a red wasp is in the house, but the worker wasps are dying now. The queen wasps are looking for a place to shelter, too, but they will spend the cold months in hidden places outdoors. A few bees are left in my pollinator beds, but the last hummingbird left our yard on Oct. 6, or very early the following day. I keep watch for their departure every year, and every year I fail to see them go. Only when I miss them do I know they’re gone.
Even the migrants, passing through, are long gone, though I keep my feeders up for any stragglers. Late arrivals, whether bird or butterfly, would find slim pickings among the flowers in my pollinator beds: The garden has been reduced to balsam and aster, plus a few stubborn zinnias. The sunflowers, still resplendent only a month ago, have turned brown and fallen over, but they are heavy now with seeds. On lonely, golden Sunday afternoons of November, I put all my faith in those seeds.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of three books, most recently “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year.” Her first picture book, “The Weedy Garden,” will be published in February.
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