Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

Author:William Maxwell [Maxwell, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49195-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

5

After a long summer of green, the prairie towns have their brief season of colour. The leaves on the trees begin to turn—first a branch, then a tree, then a whole street of trees, like middle-aged people falling in love. The maples turn bright orange or scarlet, the elms a pale poetic yellow, and before the colour has reached its height, the leaves begin to detach themselves, to drift down. Lawns have to be raked, and then raked again. Children play in leaf houses, and leaf fires smouldering in gutters change the odour of the air. The sun finds a way through bare branches to make new patterns of light and shade. The daytime, between nine o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, is like summer; but after the evening meal, women sitting in porch rockers send this or that child into the house for a shawl and are themselves driven indoors by the dark a few minutes later. The lawn mowers stand idle, frost stills the katydids and puts an end to the asters, and sadly, a little at a time, people get used to the idea of winter.

During the long September evenings, Austin King found time to collect the family snapshots and paste them in a big black scrapbook. This scrapbook was part of a set, of the great American encyclopædia of sentimental occasions, family gatherings, and stages in the growth of children. The volumes are not arranged alphabetically and it doesn’t matter very much which one you open, since each of the million or so volumes is likely to contain, among other things,

a picture of a statue in a park

of children playing in the sand at the seashore

of the horses waiting at the paddock gate

of the float that won first prize

of the new house before the roof was finished

of a winding mountain road

of Sunset Hill, of Mirror Lake

of a nurse wheeling a baby carriage

of a tree leaning far out over the bank of a creek

of the tennis court when there was no one on it.

of two families seated along the steps of a band pavilion

of the dead rattlesnake

of a sign reading Babylon 2 miles

of a row of rocking chairs on a hotel veranda

of the view from the ridge

of girls with young men they did not marry

of a picnic by the side of the road

of a camping wagon

of the cat that did not stay to have its picture taken

of a boy holding his bicycle

of summer cottages on a small inland lake

of the dog that was run over

of the little boy in a pony cart, with a formal flower bed and the stone gates of the asylum in the background

of a man with a string of fish

of the graduation class

of the oak tree in the garden

of the children wading with their clothes pulled up to their thighs

of a parade

of a path shovelled through deep snow

of a man aiming a rifle

of a boy walking on his hands

of a Christmas tree taken when the needles were beginning to fall

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