JOY ALONG THE WAY: ETERNITY AS SEEN FROM AN APPLE ORCHARD

On a lazy summer afternoon I noticed the purple martins, together with their young ones, were getting ready to leave. You can tell. They get very garrulous. I think the martins from up the street come for a Departure Party, discussing which route they'll take going to the south this year. The chortles and trills and general exuberance I interpret as, "Good-by. We've enjoyed your company. See you next spring."

It is always a sign that a season has passed its zenith and is on the downslide. So soon? Didn't the roses just bloom? The robins just hatch? I look out the kitchen window and see the new generation of robins already making the birdbath appear to be a motor-driven fountain.

I thought it must be time to go see what has happened to the apple blossoms. Always, something new coming up. Choosing a relatively cool day I made my visit. The earlier blossoms have metamorphosed into blushing round globes. I took my camera along to make it appear that I had some business there as I walked down an aisle between the Rome Beauties and the Jonathans.

I did have business there. I wanted to live over an old memory. On lazy summer afternoons, Grandma used to tie on a big, white, starched apron, get her basket of quilt scraps and head for the orchard. "A person could get a breath of air there," she explained. She would find a comfortable spot to sit, probably on the shady side of the Maiden Blush tree, and soon the click of needle against thimble would blend with other busy sounds -- insects droning, chickens clucking up in the barn lot.

I usually accompanied Grandma, hoping a ripe apple would fall at my feet or that Grandma might have a peppermint in the bottom of her basket. The orchard fell away gently toward the meadow where we could see our cows lying in the shade of the river trees. Across the river were fields rising toward the hills that folded into each other, higher and higher, blue deepening to indigo and then purple.

It was not a setting where one's thoughts would often take a dolorous turn; yet it was there in our orchard that I learned about Grandma's concept of eternity.

Someone had recently died in our community. I had noticed that the folks roundabout skirted the word, died. They would say "passed away" or "gone home." Our minister had said Joe had entered eternity. Grandma took issue with this. Then, on a day in the orchard, I asked her why. "Nobody can enter eternity," she said with conviction. "They're already there."

She took off her glasses and wiped them thoughtfully. "Eternity began a long time ago. No one can say for sure how long, but for a starting point let us say it began on the first page of Genesis.

You know about that, don't you?" she asked, focusing her pale blue eyes on me.

I nodded that I did, then quoted what I'd learned in Sunday School, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

"That's right," she said. "Heaven and earth and all of time. That's eternity."

She sewed a couple more patches together. Then, "Look," she said, pointing. "There's the barn lot up there. Here, next to it, is the orchard, and there, over the fence, are the pastures and fields and hills. Let's say the barn lot is that part of eternity which was here before you were born. This orchard is the place where you are now. The pastures and fields and those high, mysterious hills are part of eternity you'll learn about when you leave the orchard. It's all connected, see?"

I thought this over while the insects droned and the grasshoppers made high jumps. "But, Grandma, that means we're in eternity now!"

"Exactly!" How pleased she was at my childish logic. I got a peppermint for it.

Grandma was not the first to reflect that eternity is here and now. But she was the one who first told me about its immediateness and its endlessness. The picture she gave me of eternal change and progress brings me serenity. Why count the passing of my days in one place any more than in another? I feel so sure that life is all of a whole, a forever continuing chain of place and circumstances.

REJOICE!