Autumn thoughts on inheritance, impermanence, analog living and learning to harmonize a life in the greater St. Louis region, and St. Charles in particular
As readers, we are grazers — we live our lives nibbling at what life has to offer. We take what we believe we need, riskily leave what we believe we do not. Yes, we feast occasionally on one writer or one kind of book, but most days we graze across the shelves, across the hours. Lately our plate has been heavy with memoirs and biographies, especially those rooted in Paris in the teens and thirties or in New York during the same electric era — stories of artists, thinkers, wanderers and restless creative lives.
In this grazing, we stumbled upon a line by George Eliot who, despite the best efforts of several professors in our past, never quite set root in us. Sorry, Middlemarch — still a slog. But this line from somewhere else in her work caught us unexpectedly: “Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize.” We do not know exactly where it came from, and it hardly matters — the sentiment landed.
In our callow youth we might have clung to melancholy, believing ache equaled depth. Today it is harmonize that follows us down the garden path. Politics and modern life aside, we work as hard at harmonizing as we do in our gardens, rooms and walls — pulling the threads of our days into something whole here in St. Charles, just northwest of St. Louis, where the suburbs thin into woods and fields and where tending a handmade life still feels possible.
The word legacy comes from the Latin legatus, meaning ambassador, envoy, deputy — someone entrusted to carry something forward. (Yes, we looked it up.) Over centuries the meaning narrowed to property and money, then widened again to include reputation, values, influence — the intangible inheritance of character and place. Sven Birkerts once wrote that every act of reading is also an act of remembering, and that feels right here — a word can hold both history and longing. Yet language keeps shrinking, meanings pared down by speed and convenience. A shame; language is at its best when it stretches to hold memory and possibility.
We once assumed legacy meant leaving something to our sons — money, perhaps. A way of giving what we had not been given in our own Midwestern upbringing. But two truths: A) we may not have much to leave (as our own parents did not), and B) even if we could, money feels impersonal, tinged with entitlement.
We also assumed legacy meant grandchildren. That hoped-for chapter seems to have passed. And so we turn again toward the inner life — toward the kind of legacy one builds with words, photographs, gardens and the stubborn, hopeful labor of making meaning where one stands.
Marcus Aurelius reminded us that all things vanish quickly — bodies and memory both. Stephen Koch modernized the point: if no one minds the story, it dissolves. Both knew what we are learning on this little rise above the Missouri River valley: remembrance is never guaranteed.
We walk, too often, through Legacy Land — a Brigadoon-ish territory thick with emotional tar pits, where one step can feel like trudging through Mordor. Or, to use Tolkien’s name, the Land of Shadow. Ann Patchett, writing recently in The New Yorker, reminded us that death cannot be managed; perhaps legacy is simply our attempt to negotiate with that unmanageability.
Legacy, we now see, is not tangible. It lives in the minds of others — terrain we cannot landscape. Acceptance circles back on Snob Hill like a stray cat we keep coaxing closer. Acceptance demands diligence and patience — the former we have, the latter remains a work in progress.
We read. We write. We photograph — still often with film, because some legacies deserve grain and patience. We live. We tend our small patch — proof that process outshines product.
Impermanence also shows up in objects. One of us received the musket and powder horn, the banker’s table, the watches. To the side, our sister received Mom’s jewelry — the key quietly passed along, the costume pieces left behind. Title over merit. A familiar Midwestern family story. Twice told, on both sides.
That sister now earns her living as a business and performance coach — and a succession planner. Irony knows its stage. To her credit, she asked our father to deliver the news. But years have passed with no gesture, no small offering to say, “This too was yours.” Not right-a-wrong stuff — just acknowledgment. Silence polished the bruise rather than healing it.
Another father nearly handed a will to the wrong heir because “he is the son.” Enter Monty Python: “Someday, son, all this will be yours.” “What, the curtains?” In this case, the heir was a drug runner, addict, serial bankrupt — yet tradition trumped judgment. Time softened that sting. The jewelry’s remains sharper.
One of our sons says there is too much secrecy in our family. He is not wrong. Our family-night viewing was “Antiques Roadshow” and “Secrets of the Dead.” Hidden things, provenance, burial and unearthing — and the smug righteousness of PBS. Some inherit silver; we inherited silence and curiosity wrapped in good manners.
Autumn sharpens such reflections. Light angles, leaves crisp, the gardens show bone. We imagine relics — not relics yet, though the knees have opinions. We hope to be remembered less for objects than for how we tended, looked, made, cared.
We imagined grandparenthood — Midwestern porch rocking and soup wisdom. Artist Amy Sherald once said her grandmother was the internet. We felt that. We had elders who held the world together with casseroles and quiet knowing. We hoped to do the same. Life chose otherwise.
We look instead to gentler continuance. Writer Reyes Ramirez imagines future generations discovering that he “spoke and wrote and loved.” We hold that hope too. Ours may not travel through genealogy. Perhaps a niece or cousin-branch descendant — maybe even one from the jewelry side — will stumble across us and feel a tug. They will not, of course, be fastening a brooch or ring lifted under the gentle banner of “family decisions.” But they may receive something less portable and more durable: a sentence that stays, an image that sharpens, a story that steadies. Legacies slip past velvet pouches and land where curiosity lives.
Thinking too long about legacy courts loneliness. Better to return to living.
C. S. Lewis wrote about bombs, but the wisdom holds: if legacy comes, let it find us planting, repainting, writing, cooking, laughing — not huddled around theories of remembrance.
So we build. We tend. Sheds, trellises, fire pits, raised beds — the quiet handmade architecture of a life in St. Charles, Missouri, on the softer edge of St. Louis. A shed someone may love someday. A trellis that might feel inevitable to a stranger’s eye. That may be enough.
The interior legacy fades with us — but it has borne fruit: two good men carrying our better notes forward. Legacy can radiate without lineage. Influence travels in circles we never witness.
And this is where Eliot returns: harmonize. Legacy is not a musket or necklace or tidy family saga. It is how well we harmonized what we built with how we lived — in gardens and walls, in mistakes and tenderness, in photographs and autumn light.
Perhaps those conservationists were right: take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time. We have certainly taken pictures — enough to prove we were here and looking closely.
In the end, legacy lives in intangibles: affection, character, sense of place, a way of seeing. A life tended with care is its own story. No outside philosophers required — just the steady inner voice saying we did, and will keep doing, our best.
We feel our mothers’ hands on our heads at this realization — no musket, necklace or flowers required.
If anything remains beyond that, it is gravy.
Note: This appeared originally, in a slightly different form, in Tidings of Mapies litearary journal.
