Spring and Fall

 My sister was telling me this afternoon about her recent efforts to clean the house. When she decided to give away a pair of old sandals, she was surprised by the level of resistance she encountered from my nephew. "Mom," he said, "you can't get rid of your sandals!" He retrieved them from the give-away box, and proceeded to shed tears over the prospect of losing them. 

This struck some deeply familiar chord in me from childhood. I immediately thought of all the inanimate objects whose loss similarly grieved me at his age. One might say—but they weren't even his sandals! But I distinctly recall feeling similarly heartbroken for days as a child when my parents decided to replace the carpet in one of our rooms; and it was not even my own. 

What is it that we were actually crying for? It hit me. "It is Margaret you mourn for." I heard the line from G.M. Hopkins's poem in my head. That's what we're really grieving. What disturbed me as a child about the carpet changing was not so much that I was attached to the specific pattern that preceded it—but simply that one version of the room was now gone forever. 

Likewise with the sandals. What's sad is not the shoes themselves. But the fact that, once gone, they can never be found again—at least not that same pair. A change, once accomplished, cannot be undone. My nephew and I cried—just like the subject of Hopkins's poem—simply because we were having our first encounter (of which life brings many more) with the irrevocable.

That is why Márgarét was grieving over golden grove unleaving. That is why my nephew shed tears for the lost sandals; why I cried for the carpet that, once torn up and thrown away, could never be retrieved. It is the blight man was born for. It was Joshua I mourned for.