Remembering Paul

RICHARD GILBERT

I walk the gravel driveway to the barn and wonder what happened to September, a month I’ve learned to savor. “Any fool can admire October,” I told my son Tom just last year, “but September is subtle.” 
Here in southern Ohio the tulip poplars and black locusts drop leaves. Yellow petals flutter across the road. Brown fronds tumble after cars, rasp on the blacktop and curl in the parched ditches. The roadside trees are dusty, their heavy foliage sags, but the hayfields take on a sheen as the worst of the heat lifts. Rains are sparse but moisture lingers, and the grasses use every drop. Summer has spent itself and fall hasn’t arrived. September hangs in the balance, a mellow retrospective on the struggle that’s now history, another growing season’s savage extremes. What a dry year. Or, Sure got flooded. 
But somehow this year I missed September, and the frost is late—I can’t believe it’s October. The leaves have changed, however, and big wolf spiders again startle us by occupying our house for the winter. They creep, regard us like crabs in a sideways dodge, make a chitinous crunch underfoot.
This morning is cool and clear. A breeze stirs southeast. I’m wearing a fleece work shirt and a knit cap, dressed for my mission of clearing the barn’s central aisle so that tonight I can tow in a trailer loaded with bales of hay and stack them inside, safe from the low November sky that I’m certain is coming. For years I kept the barn’s center clear so trucks could enter the front door and leave out the rear. When towing a trailer it’s best to avoid backing, so I respected that travel lane and didn’t let clutter encroach. But last spring I converted it into a temporary sheep pen. Now it’s time to reclaim the area; there’s a new urgency in the air. I drag apart my makeshift corral and lean sections against the walls. 
Suddenly I think of Paul. I picture my hired hand bustling across the barn on his bowed legs, moving fast, his pink face shining in the barn’s gloom. We always reconfigured the barn together. He seemed to like the spring-cleaning aspect, and it pleased me to make a transition at last into a new season. Paul’s death is what happened to September. He died three months before his seventieth birthday. We worked together for five years, until he got sick two years ago. Paul and I built fences, drenched and weighed sheep, cut brush, pitch-forked manure. I hadn’t been thinking of him and now, in the barn without him for the first time, I’m lonely. 

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