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Category: seasons

Darkness to Light

Darkness to Light

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At 6:45 there is barely any light in the sky. Holiday displays mark the boundaries of street and yard. Our beacon, as they’re intended to be. As for other illumination, it’s still scarce. How easy it is this time of year to think that darkness is winning.

I look out my office window, can barely make out each tree trunk. But the longer I stare, the more individual limbs and branches begin to show themselves, a filigree of darkness against the lightening clouds. The sky is a blotter sopping up the light. Darkness still reigns on ground level; nothing distinct down there yet. No trampoline, garden bench or witch hazel tree. All of that is out of sight, a void. Instead, my eyes are drawn toward the sky, and toward a faint blush of pink gathering around the tree line.

My window faces south, so the big show is out of sight, to my left. I walk into the other room, peer out the window. Dawn barely underway. A smudge of red on the horizon. But walking back in here just 15 minutes later, what a change. Now I see the covered garden bench, the limbs of the witch hazel tree, the white husks of the shells bordering its garden, the azalea and its entourage. The border of leaves and grass.

By 7:12 it is unqualifiedly morning. What a difference 28 minutes can make.

Creeping Jenny

Creeping Jenny

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It’s Advent, the season of waiting. But waiting for what? The birth of Christ, the gathering of the clan, the arrival of yet another box from Amazon? Or for a contentment I long for but can’t explain.

Advent is also the season of preparation, not just wrapping gifts and baking cookies but preparing ourselves spiritually. For me, the best way to prepare is to stop waiting and bask in the moment.

Today’s moment is noticing the jaunty upward growth of the Creeping Jenny plant. I’ve been neglecting it, putting it on top of the bookshelf in my office so it would trail down from on high in romantic tendrils, like wisps of hair escaping from a Gibson Girl bun. 

But it gets no sun there, so I moved it yesterday to a free corner of my desk. It already looks healthier, greener, more in sync with its surroundings. I want to be like that plant: well placed and pointing toward the sun.

Warming Up

Warming Up

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Cold weather moved in yesterday. It wasn’t frigid by winter standards, but by the gentler measures of late fall, it was significant. 

The wind and cold reminded me how hard it can be to drag myself out of a warm house into a brisk breeze.  But it also reminded me that the body is a furnace stoked by motion. The colder I am, the faster I walk.  

Yesterday I was almost running. 

(One place where I wasn’t cold yesterday: a sunny bank full of warmth and glare.)

Weathering

Weathering

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I noticed it on my recent forays in Washington state but I notice it here, too:  the beauty abundant this time of year. Though it is the season of diminishment, it’s also a season of plentitude, a harvest of fluttering last leaves, a bounty of bare branches.

Leave beauty up to nature, I think, conveniently skipping tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters. Nature knows what to take and what to leave behind. It is seldom gaudy or superfluous, always the right amount of color or cover. 

There is a subtle reassurance this time of year. It speaks of weathering, of seeking splendor in the frail and fallen, of finding enough in what is left behind.

Stan’s Side

Stan’s Side

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For the last few days I’ve been getting to know an old friend, Standard — Stan for short.

I haven’t seen him since March, but here he is again, and up to his usual tricks: early mornings, early evenings, a sense that darkness is winning. In a way, it’s not his fault. He arrives on the scene just as the light is fading, and departs when it’s coming into its own. He’s left holding the bag.

Some people want to banish him forever. Others think we should get rid of his flashy cousin. Until we do one or the other, Stan will be the sober fellow who says “you really should go home now, it’s getting dark” or “early to bed and early to rise.” 

If you happen to catch him in the morning, though … it’s a different story. Trust me, I know.  

(Two sunrise photos in a row? Stan made me do it.)

Super Scary!

Super Scary!

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Ghosty has been with us for years, a piece of fabric with a stuffed-newspaper head and inexpertly-drawn eyes. He’s been haunting our lamp post for the better part of two decades, and when I at first couldn’t find him in the basement a week ago, I felt bereft.

Compare him with the current crop of Halloween decorations. The 12-foot-tall Skelly, for instance, a plastic skeleton so popular that Home Depot can’t keep it in stock. Or the gruesome, leering werewolf that rears his ugly head from a woods near me. I wouldn’t want to run into him on a dark night.

It’s all fun and games — unless you’re a child with an overactive imagination. Since I was one of those, I feel for the kiddos who see a masked face so scary that a full year later they can’t forget about it.

It’s super-sized Halloween terror, coming soon (already!) to a suburban lawn near you.

(Top photo: courtesy Home Depot)

Autumn Afternoon

Autumn Afternoon

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A late walk through the woods, along the lake, over the bridge, and back to where I started from.

No question what time of year it is. If the leaves didn’t clue me in …

the peg-legged skeleton pirate did. 

But there are still patches of green, remnants of summer left behind. 

Shoulder Seasons

Shoulder Seasons

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What is it about shoulder seasons? Are spring and fall truly more poetic or do they just seem that way? 

“Margaret are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “Spring and Fall to a Young Child.”

Autumn and spring are times of great beauty, times when it’s easier to notice the underpinnings of things: the uncoiling of a fern, the thinning of leaves. 

I wonder, too, if spring and fall aren’t times of greater yearning, when we see outside our small worlds to what lies beyond. 

Author Susan Cain would call these seasons bittersweet, “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” 

A Reckoning

A Reckoning

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The furnace came on this morning. I smelled the heat before I felt it, slightly acrid but warm and comforting, too. The aroma of thick bathrobes and steaming kettles and stepping inside from a cold rain. 

We could have held out longer, but why? It’s inevitable. The cold is coming. Toughing it out won’t keep it away. 

As befits a day of forced air heat, clouds dominate, and the stillness they bring is welcome. They promise seclusion and concentration and a long writing session. They promise cold, too. 

Backward Glance

Backward Glance

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I know people who extol the beauties of fall — the color, the crispness, the end of humidity — but I’m not one of them. To me there’s always a backward glance at this time of year.

I don’t mind the heat, I relish cicada song, and I love the long days that summer brings.

So on the last day of this summer, I’m reveling in the sun that’s trying to peak through the ever-thickening cloud cover, and I’m savoring the adventures — from Seattle to Scotland and all the places in between.