h o m e p l a c e Though it would probably cause my pioneer Methodist and Baptist forebears (and maybe a few of my modern Lutheran and Episcopalian friends as well) spiritual heartburn to hear, the older I get the more I’m convinced that the manmade barriers that divide people of faith — denominations and rigid doctrines that sharply articulate religious boundaries — mean far more to man than they do to God, whoever and whatever God happens to be. In a world where more information is conveyed in a single day’s news cycle than all of man’s previous time on this Earth, and thanks to mobile phones no one is — in theory — ever alone, the survivability of our religious traditions may well depend on the people of all faiths finding and nurturing the essential spiritual common ground of love without boundaries. For reasons I’m at a loss to fully explain, these kinds of long thoughts always seem so much clearer to me come November, a month I’ve come to think of as the Transcendental Month because something about the clear light falling across harvested fields or through woods stripped bare of their leaves seems like a benediction to another year’s sacred cycle of life, a bittersweet reminder of our own fragile impermanence. Whatever else is true, there is something holy in the knowledge that we are also just passing through, perhaps eventually transcending the temporal cares of both nature and man, perishable as any last rose of summer, like the tiny yellow ones that held on in my terrace garden all the way to Thanksgiving week last year. Up in Maine, where the season closes quickly, I loved mowing my lawn for a final time, then draining and putting away the mower for the season, setting off to cover my tenderest perennial beds with salt straw and erect my ridiculous Rube Goldberg plant protectors, an effort against the coming snows. After this annual autumn ritual there wasn’t much left for a Southern-fried Transcendental to do in November but work his wood pile, after which I would often plant myself on a peeling blue wooden bench in what I called my Philosopher’s Garden — the highest point on my hilltop, a gentle bosom of thin soil cloistered by hemlocks, white
spire birch and American beech — and read a bit of Emerson or Thoreau or the poetry of Robert Frost or simply watch the glory of late autumn fade through the trees. It was the light and the deep quiet that made November such a hallowed time on my hilltop. Even now, years later, in a different phase of life, come the hallowed light of November, you’re liable to find me out walking a country road or tromping through the woods in the company of my dogs, pottering around in my gone-by garden or sitting out on the terrace with coffee two hours before dawn admiring a starry sky and planets that seem to shine even brighter in the Transcendental Month. Unable to pass an old cemetery with tilting stones, I’m all but guaranteed to pull over and go wandering for a bit, reading faded epitaphs and names, remembering souls who shared a walk through this transcendental veil. If the church door is unlocked early, wherever I happen to be that day, Greensboro or Wilmington or somewhere on a distant road, following a pattern of behavior I’m too old to abandon now, I’m bound to slip in and sit for a spell in the clear morning light, hearing a fine sermon in the sweet silence — to paraphrase Emerson — even before the Thanksgiving service begins. When the music starts, I’ll hope for “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” my favorite autumnal anthem, Isaac Watts’ great hymn of remembrance that’s still sung in rural churches and great cathedrals across the world, the middle stanza of which never fails to catch in my throat and reassure a wandering spiritual pilgrim. A thousand ages in Thy sight, Are like an evening gone; Short as the watch that ends the night, Before the rising sun. b Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@saltmagazinenc.com
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As a native son of the area, Broker/Realtor, Lee Crouch has been exploring the unique surroundings of Wilmington, Wrightsville Beach and the Intracoastal Waterway since childhood. For 25 years, he has put that local knowledge into listing, marketing and selling beach and waterfront properties. Lee has built his reputation on a lifetime of experience and years of customer satisfaction.
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Walter Sprunt home - Shandy Point circa 1920
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LEE CROUCH Lee Crouch as a young boy preparing for a sailboat race. Wrightsville igh ig ghts t villelel Beach, h circa 1968. h,
523 Causeway Drive, Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina 28480 800.533.1840 or 910.512.4533 The Art & Soul of Wilmington
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leecrouch@intracoastalrealty.com November 2013 •
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