Aging becomes them.

The summer before he died, Grandfather McRea sat in the tall grass of the blueberry patch while my daughter and I gleaned the last berries. It was one of those perfect July days, clear and still. We were working in the shadow of the hemlock and cedar Grandfather left standing when he logged the place thirty years ago, but the meadow was full of light, the valley brilliant. Now and then a horse would nicker in the near distance.

I had never known Grandfather to sit down like that. Even in his eighties he could do the work of three men. But weakened then by the bone cancer that killed him, he leaned back against a fence post and talked while we worked, clasping his knees like a boy, pausing now and then to look out at the valley; and the light poured down on the meadow, and Maggie and I moved among the cool leaves.

I hadn't expected to take such pleasure in the company of a dying man. The calm I felt in his presence was so deep it had the effect somehow of luxury. There was sadness, too, that final trip, as we prepared for Grandfather's dying, but more than that, unexpectedly, spreading all around us, seeping into us, was a sense of peace and forgetfulness and long, slow releasing. Being with him was like taking the waters at some secret spa.

Later that week on the other side of the state, in Spokane, I had the same sense of silence and release taking Grandma Gottwig to visit the Gottwig graves. The sun was hot on the broad lawns of the cemetery, so I kept Grandma at the fringe, in the shadow of ponderosa, guiding her around sprinkler heads. The air was dry, aromatic. At Aunt Lettie's grave Grandma told the story again: cleaning the house one day, top to bottom--dusting and polishing and folding--and then the fire in the attic that night, flames shooting into the hallway, Lettie dead in the smoke, my six-year-old mother thrown out the upper window, nothing but charred timbers in the morning, blackened furniture. "I don't know," Grandma always says. "A clean house just didn't seem important after that."

But what I recall most vividly is not the telling of the story but the green of the grass and the stillness of the air and the deep pleasure I felt again, for the second time that week. Being with Grandma was as therapeutic as a morning in the garden or a long afternoon in the library. The lawns swept up the hill, the sun shone down, and Grandma and I made our way among the markers, talking of the big fire.

The rest of the vacation I did my usual babbling about the year's struggles and accomplishments. With everyone else I can't stop trying to justify and impress, my words getting away from me, straining and sticky. The pleasure I felt with Grandfather and Grandma Gottwig came from knowing I had nothing to prove. With them my triumphs and failures flattened out in a larger perspective, fading into some simpler, more elemental plot. I remember thinking, with sudden clarity: here I am, picking blueberries with my daughter, and Grandfather is sitting in the grass. Here I am, helping Grandma Gottwig up the hill, and the sun is all around us. Silences were possible, and in those silences a kind of openness, a kind of exhaling.

Sometimes I have this feeling serving as a Eucharistic Minister at the 5:00 P.M. Saturday Mass. There are five or six of us usually. We process in with the priest, singing, and bow at the altar. After the homily we bring up the wine and hosts, stand behind the priest during the Lamb of God, and after taking Communion ourselves, pick up a plate or cup and move to our assigned position (there's a chart in the back room with x's and o's to show where we should be). If I'm giving the bread, I lift each host, say "the Body of Christ," and place it either on the palm or the tongue. If I'm giving the wine, I say "the Blood of Christ," offer the cup, then wipe the rim with a purificator, twisting the stem counter-clockwise with my right hand. Depending on my position around the altar I can serve up to fifty people. When I'm finished I go to the sanctuary to help drink the remaining wine and lock up the leftover hosts, then we process back out after the announcements, two by two, singing the final hymn.

What's occasionally so satisfying about these rituals is their silence and the scriptedness. I speak rarely, usually with others, and the words I speak are not my own. I say what I am supposed to say, stand where I am supposed to stand, in exactly the same way, week after week, inventing none of it, never improvising.

There's a sense of participation. I move around in the dark church, the organ playing, children fussing in the back pews, the smell of candles in the dusk, occasionally nodding to another member of the team, quietly purposeful. All that matters is my presence--all that matters is that someone is performing my task. It could be anyone. But it's me. In a sense the ceremony is entirely impersonal, apart from what I've done or failed to do that day. Yet in spite of that, or because of it maybe, I now and then feel a kind of personal fulfillment at the Mass that I never feel in the life I invent and direct.

Most of the members of the team are older, in their sixties and seventies, though there is no pulling of rank. We don't know each other outside of Mass, yet there's a camaraderie among us now that we've been working together a couple of years. Our greetings are genuine: Ruth in her gray suit, Mildred in sweat pants, Ray in his polyester sports jackets, smelling of aftershave, shoes shined, silver hair combed back behind his hearing aid.

It seems a more-or-less secular feeling, I should say, even indulgent. It's not that I have spiritual insights usually but simply that I come away at ease. The ritual and the community are a balm, physically pleasurable in a way, reassuring.

From our house I can take a long walk through the forest to a stand of old-growth fir. It's about five or six miles away, in one of the upper northern draws. I pack a lunch and take Max and part of the pleasure comes from the rhythm of long walking--the subsiding of other thoughts and the beginning of the slower, deeper thinking, the emergence of the old themes and images. Max trots on ahead, nosing in the brush. The familiar scenes come into view--the stream, the glimpse of the valley, the little grove of maple.

There's been a lot of hyperbole lately about old-growth forests, and in reaction some of the vested interests have questioned the aesthetic categories. What I feel is not awe but calm. What I feel moving into the old trees is very close to the calm and release and deepening I felt with Grandfather McRae in the blueberries and Grandma Gottwig at the graves, with Ruth and Mildred and Ray standing around the altar.

The huge firs have something of the dwarfing, humbling effect of a starry sky. I feel small among them, clarified by their indifferences. Their growth is so slow, their movement so gradual and massive, they seem fixed and stationary, given, and in the midst of that slowness and solidity I am slowed, too, quieted.

I always eat my lunch on a footbridge overlooking a ravine, my feet dangling. In front of me a giant snag points out of maple and oak, the twisted stem of a fir cracked off in a storm or broken under its own enormous weight. Light filters down in the gap. I sit and eat and look at the snag's scarred wood and enjoy even the absence of bird song, the dusky quiet among the trunks. Deer fern and vanilla leaf grow from the bank of the stream beneath me, where Max comes bounding up, muddy and delighted.

There are hemlock etched on Grandfather's gravestone, and there are hemlock growing in the forest behind the cemetery where he is buried, and I think about those trees now, eating my sandwich, dangling my feet over the bridge. Light filters through the gap, the snag twists out of the maple, and I am thinking of Grandfather buried on the hill, slower even than the trees, as slow as the earth.

Chris Anderson teaches English at Oregon State University in Corvallis. His Edge Effects: Notes from an Oregon Forest will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press.