..The seasons are passing one by one
So gather moments while you may
Collect the dreams you dream today
Remember, will you remember
The times of your life?
Gather moments while you may
Collect the dreams you dream today
Remember, will you remember
The times of your life?
Of your life…
Paul Anka, The Times of Your Life
Part One: Summer Without End
The summer of 1964 had no edges. It simply was—vast and green and permanent, the way only childhood summers can be.
Danny Marzetti and Tom Callahan cut through the back fence of the Callahan yard on a Tuesday morning, or maybe a Wednesday. It didn’t matter. The days had stopped having names sometime around the third week of June, and they wouldn’t get their names back until September took away their freedom.
The woods behind Harriet Lane in Cumberland opened the way woods always did, gradually, reluctantly, the light going amber, then green, then something in between that had no color in the Crayola box.
The boys pushed through the fringe of sumac and blackberry, their sneakers already dark with dew, and the neighborhood dissolved behind them like it had never been.
Tom carried a stick. He always carried a stick. He was ten, and the stick was a sword, a staff, a fishing rod, a rifle, or whatever the moment required.
Danny had a coffee can with a nail-punched hole in the lid. Inside, three night crawlers moved against each other in the dark. He had plans.
“We go to the brook first,” Danny said.
“We go where I want,” Tom said. “I’ve got the stick.”
This was unanswerable logic. They went to the brook first.
The land between Little Pond County Road and the old farm was not anybody’s land—or rather, it belonged to everyone and therefore to them. Stone walls ran through it like the outlines of a forgotten argument. Fieldstone piled by men long dead who had cleared these same acres of the same rocks that kept working their way up through the same earth every spring. The boys walked the walls the way sailors walk a rail—arms out, eyes forward, defying the fall.
They found a garter snake in a gap between two flat stones, and Tom held it while it wrapped once around his wrist and tasted the air. Then they let it go and watched it become a stone again.
The brook ran shallow and dark over a bed of rust-colored pebbles, the iron in the water leaving its stain on everything it touched. Danny dropped his line—a hook, a worm, six feet of monofilament wrapped around a forked twig—into a pool beneath an undercut bank where the water had the color of strong tea.
Tom sat on a rock and whittled the end of his stick to a point with a Scout knife he wasn’t supposed to have.
“You think there are bears?” Tom said.
“In Cumberland?”
“Could be.”
“There are no bears, Tommy.”
“My uncle says he saw tracks.”
Danny considered this. “Your uncle says a lot of things.”
The brook made its sound—not loud, not quiet, just continuous, the sound of time passing without hurry. A red-winged blackbird called from the cattails downstream. The sun moved through the canopy, and the light slid slowly across the water with it.
They stayed there two hours, or maybe three. Danny caught nothing. This was irrelevant.
Afterward, they climbed the long slope through the open fields above the brook—fields of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, timothy grass chest-high in places, the seed heads brushing their palms as they pushed through.
At the top of the rise, a single apple tree stood in the middle of the field, wild and unpruned, its trunk bent by thirty years of the same prevailing wind. They sat in its shade and ate the sandwiches Tom had stuffed in the back pocket of his dungarees—white bread, peanut butter, the bread gone flat and damp.
Below them, Cumberland spread out in its summer stillness. White houses. Dark green maples. The white steeple of the church at the center of town catching the light like a blade.
“I’m going to live here forever,” Tom said. He said this the way you say things when you are ten and the summer has no edges and forever is a reasonable proposition.
Danny said nothing, which was agreement enough.
They started home when the shadows went long, cutting back through the same woods now gone darker and cooler, the blackberries casting small shadows of their own. They were back through the fence and in the yard before Danny’s mother appeared at the back door and told him his supper was getting cold.
He couldn’t have told you, then or later, what they talked about that day. He couldn’t have told you what they did, precisely, or in what order. What he remembered—what stayed—was the quality of the light through the trees and the sound of the brook and the weight of the afternoon, how full it had been of nothing at all.
—
Part Two: The Long Way Back
—
It was Danny’s idea to go back. It was always going to be Danny’s idea.
They met in the parking lot across from Broad View Acres on a Saturday morning in October 2024, two old men in their early seventies standing beside cars that were better than they deserved, comparing the aches in their knees the way they had once compared baseball cards.
Tom had driven down from Providence. He walked with a slight list to the left now, the legacy of a hip that had been replaced and had never quite trusted the arrangement.
His hair, white since his early sixties, was shorter than Danny remembered from the last time they’d seen each other, which had been at someone’s funeral. He couldn’t remember whose anymore, and that was its own kind of trouble.
“You want to tell me why we’re doing this,” Tom said. It wasn’t entirely a question.
“Because I want to,” Danny said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s enough.”
The walk up Broad View Ave seemed steeper and longer than they remembered. And it drew some looks from people outside their old houses on Harriet Lane when they walked by and into the woods.
Different times they decided.
They found the old fence line, though the fence itself had been gone for forty years. The sumac was still there. Of course it was; sumac outlasts everything. They pushed through it with less grace than they had at ten.
Danny caught his jacket sleeve on a blackberry cane and stood untangling himself while Tom watched with the patient expression he’d been perfecting for seven decades.
“This is going well,” Tom said.
“Shut up, Tommy.”
The woods were smaller. This was not a matter of perspective; Danny had decided long ago—the woods were actually smaller, eaten at the edges by a subdivision that had arrived sometime in the 1970s, a utility easement that had arrived in the 1990s, and time itself, which arrives everywhere without asking.
But the center of it held. The canopy was higher than he remembered, the trees having had sixty more years to improve their reach toward the sky.
They walked without speaking for a while. Tom had a walking stick—an actual proper wooden one, bought at a hiking store, not a stick he’d found on the ground—and he planted it with each step on the left side, taking the weight off the rebuilt hip.
The stone walls were still there. Of course they were—fieldstone outlasts everything except sumac. But they were lower now, tumbled in places, trees growing up through the gaps where the frost had worked the stones apart over sixty winters.
“I remember walking those,” Tom said, nodding at a section that was still mostly intact.
“We walked the whole length of that one. Out to that big oak.”
“That oak’s still there, you think?”
“Let’s find out.”
It took them longer than it should have to reach the brook, partly because of Tom’s hip and partly because they stopped twice to orient themselves against a landscape that had shifted. The brook was exactly where it had always been, because brooks don’t move, or move only so slowly it doesn’t count in a human life.
It was narrower than Danny remembered. Or he was wider. One of the two.
He stood on the bank and looked at the pool beneath the undercut bank and felt something he didn’t have a clean name for—not sadness exactly, not nostalgia, which had always seemed to him a word for people who hadn’t been paying attention when they were young. Something quieter than either. A recognition.
“I never caught anything in that pool,” he said.
“You never caught anything anywhere,” Tom said. “You were a terrible fisherman.”
“I had patience.”
“You had stubbornness. It’s different.”
They found a dry log at the edge of the bank and sat on it together, the way they had sat on that rock sixty years before, and for a while neither of them said anything. The brook made the same sound. It had been making that sound since before either of them was born and would continue to do so after they were gone. There was something in this that Danny found, unexpectedly, to be a comfort.
“You remember what you said?” Danny asked. “Up on that hill. Under the apple tree.”
“I said a lot of things.”
“You said you were going to live here forever.”
Tom was quiet for a moment. A red-winged blackbird called from downstream, and both of them turned at the sound before they could think to stop themselves.
“I meant it,” Tom said. “At the time.”
“I know you did.”
“Things go the way they go.”
“They do.”
Tom turned the walking stick in his hands, studying the grain. “You come back here because you’re thinking about the end of things?”
“I come back because I’m thinking about the beginning of them,” Danny said. “There’s a difference.”
They sat with that for a while. Above them the canopy moved in a wind they couldn’t feel on the ground, the last of the October leaves catching the light on their way down, each one making its small golden argument against the dying of the season.
They did not make it to the apple tree. Tom’s hip said no with authority around noon, and they turned back through the woods the way they had come, slower now, through the sumac and out past the remains of the fence line, back to the parking lot and the cars that were better than they deserved.
Before he got in, Danny looked back at the tree line.
“Same time next year,” he said.
Tom laughed—really laughed, the same laugh he’d had at ten—and opened his car door.
“Bring better sandwiches.”
—
The brook is still running. It will be running long after both of them are gone, dark over its rust-colored stones, making its sound that is not loud and not quiet but simply continuous—the sound of time passing without hurry, carrying nothing with it but itself.
Author’s note: I grew up in Broad View Acres in Cumberland. And there were fieldstone walls, swamps, chestnut trees, and, of course, a brook. We spent many hours exploring the wood, engaging in battles with a chestnust on a shoelace, hunting frogs and snakes and fishing without catching a single fish.
It didn’t matter.
While I know for certain that the world has changed, the walls are different, and the neighborhood has grown bigger, if I close my eyes, I can walk every inch of those walls and fields and still hear the brook welcoming us back…
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