It was Robert Frost who wrote that ‘nature’s first green is gold.’ In that glorious eight line poem Frost went on to say that ‘nothing gold can stay.’

For the majority of western literary minds, it was taken to mean that anything beautiful must fade and that nothing pure can remain pure. When I first read it in the early 1970s that’s what I figured it meant too. But poetry, like life, transforms with age and standing here at 54 years old, Frost’s poem is not about fading glories. It’s about triumph.

See, when I read it first I hadn’t had the opportunity of learning traditional Ojibway teachings. I was a displaced adopted kid. That bold experiment failed miserably and when I found Robert Frost I’d already left that home and was living on the streets of St. Catharine’s, Ontario. The library was my home then and I found an old copy of New Hampshire, the Frost collection that also held Two Look at Two and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Something in the words and phrases caught me. New Hampshire had been written in 1923 and it was fifty years later that I first cracked it open. The world of Robert Frost and the world of a high school dropout in 1973 were vastly different things. There was still a vestige of pastoral rural glee in Frost’s world. In mine there were only concrete, mission beds and meal tickets. But the way he spoke of the land called to me. I sat with that book at my favorite carrel by the window for days.

Nothing Gold Can Stay made me sad at first. My life at seventeen seemed comprised of nothing but endings, of fade outs and disappearances. The things that had brought me some joy had gone and I was left largely homeless, penniless, under educated and very insecure. But the more I lived with that poem the more I came to see that Frost was speaking about becoming. He was talking about a journey to gold. That gave me hope and I determined then and there to make that journey no matter how long it took.
Well, I’m 54 and my wife and I just spent our first Christmas together as man and wife. We’ve been together for seven years and this was our seventh Christmas. We were alone together. Both of us are adopted kids who never grafted and neither of us has anything resembling family. My family still suffers the pain of fracturing that came with residential schools initially and continued through abandonment, foster care, my adoption and substance abuse. We’re more like polite strangers than blood kin. Deb’s family is fractured in another way. They could never see her as a whole person, always as someone who needed fixing, someone flawed. So we’ve learned to be each other’s family.

Our first few Christmases were celebrated with other waifs. One year we celebrated with a retired British diplomat and his wife largely stranded in Canada without a hearth. Another year we had a friend whose family could not afford to get her home along with her boyfriend. Deb’s kids were always there, sometimes their dad and a maiden aunt but for the most part they were always patched together family affairs.

When we came to the lake Christmas became the kids and us. One year we walked up into the back country and I toted back a fine young spruce that we decorated together. Another year they brought their beaus and they built a combination of a yurt and an igloo in the front yard. When they left there was always a residue of sadness and it took a few days for us, and Deb especially, to get our emotional equilibrium back. This year was no different. They came a week before the big day because their young schedules were so full they couldn’t make it Christmas Day. So we spent the day alone together.

But we made it glorious.

We rose early and shared our gifts. Then we loaded the car with fourteen bags stuffed with gifts for the tenants of the rooming house. A good friend Doreen Willis spends a big part of every year filling those bags and wrapping each article individually. There were separate bags for the women and the men. We also had personal gifts for the two women who live there and help us look after the place.

When we went from door to door and knocked and the tenants received their gifts it was incredible. These are among Canada’s most impoverished and displaced people and the smiles that broke on their faces was heart warming. They were so touched to be remembered, included and honored by gifts. Fourteen bags. Fourteen souls. Fourteen altered worlds. We gave them grocery coupons, cookies and other treats to go with the bags.

We spent over an hour there and it was amazing to see how easily spirits can be lifted and transformed. We had hugs for those who could allow them and handshakes and a clap on the shoulder for the others. Men who normally cannot speak or look another person in the eye were animated and cheerful. Women who were used to being shunted aside, ignored and discounted were voluble, laughing and glowing. Seeing it all, brought us near to tears and we left there filled with the incredible feeling of bringing the experience of change to people whose lives are bereft of it.

Then we skied on a marvelous, crisp sunny day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and we skied with joy and abandon and felt like kids again. It was as though we were weightless and we skimmed through each run laughing, smiling and joyful. When we stopped and had a bag lunch in the day lodge there was nothing else necessary. But we drove to our friends’ Jon and Irene Buckle’s home to share dinner with their family. There were thirty of them and we were soon lost in the throng of sons, daughters, in-laws, grand kids, great grand kids, dogs and a vast array of food.

Driving home along the pitch dark road through the ridges, valleys and gulches and then the flats that led to the mountains and our home, we were tired but filled with happiness. Alone together. Seven Christmases. Seven years. Seven glories.

See, we no longer bemoan the fact that our family life is virtually nonexistent. Sure, there are times when we wish we had a ‘normal’ life and envy those around us whose lives are built around family activities and occasions. There are times when we wonder why we are still treated like adopted kids and left alone at the fringes, just as there are times when we can’t wait for grandchildren, in-laws and fabulous feasts with people strewn everywhere through our little mountain home.

Nothing gold can stay. Each Christmas that led to this one shone in its own way, just as each of those seven years became the stuff of our memory. But they are not gone, disappeared or faded. They are not glories transformed by time. Nor are they dissipated energy. Instead they have become the gold of our time here, our treasure, and our story. That’s what Robert Frost was getting at in 1923. That riches are not defined by gold and one brief, shining moment can remain pure forever when held in the heart.

Nothing gold can stay. That’s because we’re all on a great, grand journey that demands change in us, in the world, and across the universe. We become gold through our relationships with each other and those relationships never end, they just change. We become gold by learning to live with our hearts because we experience best when we journey with feeling. All the gold in that, everything we gather becomes more when we cherish it. So nothing gold can stay. Life demands we make it more, that we triumph.

My wife and I are alone together. We live in a small house in the mountains overlooking a lake. We have fires in the woodstove. We have coffee in the morning when the light breaks over everything rendering all of it absolute and perfect. Gold. Then we rise and step out into it and it becomes more and so do we. Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

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