Autumn

Years ago, in 1964, the war in Vietnam was heating up; President Kennedy had been assassinated the year before; I was classified 1-A as of April 1 and could soon be in a place like Kasahn or Saigon.  Until April, though, I was a Mormon missionary in Sarbrucken, Germany, slogging through the rain-soaked leaves, systematically introducing me and my companion as “Mormons," visiting each apartment with an important message.  Not many were buying that autumn, and they hadn’t been terribly anxious the two previous autumns.

As we trudged to the next building, I kicked the golden-brown-grey fallen leaves. “Kick those leaves, Bruder,” I said to Robert Hacken, my swarthy sweet-souled, “Persian” looking companion from California. When we did get into an apartment, it was because some young thing wanted a better look at the “Perser.”  Religion itself was seldom a serious issue with the happy Germans riding the wave of what they called the Wunderwirtschaft—the “miracle economy,” fed in large part by the war that everybody seemed to hate.

“Next year, you’ll be kicking these same leaves, Hacken,” I said, “and I’ll be home, married to Carolyn, snuggling in a run-down apartment within walking distance of the BYU campus, finishing my senior year, reading three books at a time, living on Campbells soup and looking at that giant mountain above campus which had posed two questions the year before my mission:  “Where will I go?” and “Will Carolyn wait?”

Two autumns before, I had sat on a sedgy bank outside Lampertheim.  While Bill Zentner, my first companion [a gem of a missionary], expertly skipped rocks across the pond, I read a contraband copy of Wordsworth’s poetry.

When Carolyn and I moved to Rexburg to teach at Ricks College, we discovered a valley full of saints, a “job” that was a daily blessing, cold—I mean really cold for two people who had spent their youth in Escondido, California.  But we also discovered Autumn in Idaho.

I loved the touch of crisp cold on my nose, the hoar-frost on the lawn—and the turning and the falling of the leaves.  The bustle of returning students.  Coach Tiny Grant’s football team.

And premonitions of death.  The death of spring.  “Leaves, like the things of man,” Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “what the heart [at some point learns] heard of, ghost [spirit] guessed.”  Carolyn died on October 14^th last year—the last day of autumn weather.  Winter suddenly roared into the valley in the days that followed.

For me, however, autumn is, yes, Gerard’s, “sorrow’s springs.”  But death is life; “except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground.”  The autumn of ’65, Carolyn and I married.  A letter arrived from Bobby Hacken in Germany.  Inside was a single leaf.