High in one of our pear trees are three golden fruits left behind during the harvest. Whether this salvation was achieved by living remotely or from neglect and laziness of the farmer it is difficult to say. But each sunset, until we have the right well-timed storm, they still shine before their fall.

In the working-class neighborhood of Knoxville where we lived years ago, we walked one fine autumn evening down the streets to the Bill Meyer stadium. We waved at our neighbor two doors away, as we passed him playing the recorder on his broad front porch. Down another block and around the corner, two friends called out from their porch about our evening, and asked where were we going. They then joined us, their two small children in tow, in our stroll to our destination, for an evening of baseball.

We paid the modest $4 fee and found a cluster of empty seats in the packed stands. The local team, the Knoxville Blue Jays, was playing the Carolina Mudcats. The left field wall was the century-old Standard Knitting Mill, where out of the windows during breaks the workers would lean to catch the game and a breeze, a smoke in one hand. We sat on the bleachers, beer in one hand and a hotdog in the other, and chatted and cheered, before walking back home.

The mill closed soon after, partially bulldozed into rubble, the remainder left derelict and waiting for the same. The workers and community dispersed to wherever they could find purchase on a new life. The stadium followed, as the owners chased the bigger tourist dollars in an adjoining county. The marriage of our friends who walked with us, fractures in the foundation already visible to all who cared to notice, also fell. And the friend who serenaded us with music from his porch died unexpectedly a few years after that night.

This past Friday, having landing at the airport from a business trip, I drove to Shannondale nursing home to sit with my aunt. She had broken her hip the previous weekend. Holding her hand, I asked her to tell me a story. For out of 99 years of living she has a repertoire of thousands. And like a skilled troubadour, she can pull them out and launch into a telling that places you, roots you, in a world that has disappeared. Some of the changes are to be embraced, some bring on a crippling nostalgia for what was lost, and others merely mark the gulf between today’s techno-world and the landscape of her birth.

With the bustle in the hallway as background, she told me for the umpteenth time of the big flood of 1940 in Crowley, LA. For five days the city lay under water. Her father’s house, built high, remained dry. The house was opened to the women and children who lived in nearby flooded homes. Where the men stayed, she never says. For days guests lived on the big wrap-around porch and throughout the first floor. The men pushed boats through the muddy waters each day to retrieve Red Cross food packages and bring them to the women who lived on the porch.

After an hour, tired from my own trip, anxious to be home, guilty over departing, I left her lying in her bed.

That evening I sat in the back yard to plan my work on the farm. So much to do this season before the winter. With a notepad in front of me, I prepared to make notes and wrote nothing down.

I just stared at those three golden pears waiting patiently for the wind, to go home.

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Reading this weekend: In Search of the Common Good (Meador)

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