Pilgrim Letters: Promise in Dust

The living air exhales caramel breaths—warm, golden, delicious. Every breeze wafts a new hue across the senses.

Sky blinks cloudless, batting blue eyes. As though straining with the labourers, she flushes deeper pigment—and puddle and slough reflect her cobalt complexion.

Grass exchanges velvet green coats for linen browns, transforming assumed undergrowth into a menagerie of bristle, straw, mulch clump, and dulling emeralds.

And in the evening light, even dust glimmers beauty. Suspended like organza sashes of some grand dancer, it floats and lingers, slivers of milky mist, whiffs of toffee.

Sweeping, inviting, lingering—dust envelopes the pilgrim, calling deeper, pointing beyond; hinting, always hinting, making one look and ponder.

The fields waiting consummation, grain laying dead in bundled rows—silent, still, finished. Soon it will be in bin and truck and terminal, this living death of waiting, till at last it can die again in soil, and truly live. Machines churning in procession, orderly, stoic, pitiless, dutiful; their drivers squinting in receding sun. Saved all year, for these ten days of labour, red and green and yellow they plod; cutting, collecting, shelling, saving the promises in hopper and auger.

Soon, it will pass. Soon, machines will rest in Quonset, seeds will wait in bins, farmers will break for winter blizzards. Next year, we will do it all over again. We will hope, and pray, and wish each other well as we work the land, and the soil works into us.

Colours deepen, then fade. A giant Canada goose points south, stationary, glimmering, then withering into wisp of cloud.

We sigh with the land. We fade with the land. We groan with the land. And we bear fruit, in season, like the land, our lives reflecting and refracting colour from the Light of Life.

And we, with the land, remember, and live promise.