[Dialogue] Ann Harrison Avery

[PAUL SCHRIJNEN]

Desmond Avery writes:

Ann Harrison Avery, 16 December 1940 -  25 September 2022
Full of gratitude for Ann’s life, we sang ‘For all the the saints’ at her funeral in our local church in rural England the day before yesterday. The church was full, and everybody knew the tune.  In his eulogy Paul Schrijnen read this poem Ann had written one previous October:

Autumn Joy


I like to shuffle through the leaves

yellow and brown

	    Beauty all over the ground.

I could just keep on looking down.
But then I look up at the branches
Where the last leaves linger
just a few days longer
still some green with yellow and gold
each tree different
black trunk's shape showing through
as the tree undresses gradually.
Soon it will stand, stark naked against the sky.

I remember autumns in other times and other places.
- Red maples in a Toronto cemetery,
- Virginia creeper in Geneva as scarlet as in Wellingore
- Red sumac in Chattanooga on a red-clay lot as it is now on our green garden
- A golden forest in a park south of Paris.

My mother's birthday is in October - is that why I love autumn?
Or is it, that I love the fact, that the colours are always present in the leaf
Hidden beneath the chlorophyll, 
And the idea that the colours of our lives are always within us,
waiting to blaze forth as the greenness of youth recedes?



The colours are doing just that here now.
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