It looks like an interloper in the garden, a volunteer tree that decided to grow there overnight. But it’s actually a branch impaled by the wind — just about the only evidence we have of the storm that’s ravaging our neighbors to the north.
Apparently, folks in Boston are getting as much snow per hour as we’ve gotten all winter. That would be two inches.
This makes it official. No complaints about winter this year. They’re not allowed.
No masks yet; we haven’t come to that. But I flinch from my Metro seatmate, who hacks his way through the long ride in from Vienna. And I touch as little as possible, pressing a glove, or a sleeve or a paper towel into duty.
At church they announced a temporary hiatus of the common cup (a bizarre tradition anyway; other faiths, with their individual thimbles of wine, are more rational about this) and asked us to respect those who choose not to shake hands during the sign of peace.
In my pew no one shook hands. Was everyone sick? Did everyone think I was sick? Or was this the excuse we’ve all been waiting for? A retreat into private prayer.
Cold and flu season makes one thing clear: non-communication is contagious.
It’s one of the colder mornings of the year, but the birds don’t seem to notice. They’re rustling about in the azalea bushes, flitting from branch to branch of the denuded oaks.
They harken to some older signal, some lengthening of the day, some freshening of the wind.
They seem to think it’s spring, or at least the beginning of it.
Who am I to disagree?
I noticed these green shoots more than a week ago. They may have peeked through in late December. The ground has been easy to peek through, after all. A few cold blustery days but warmer than usual for the most part.
Yesterday was mild and foggy, today more of the same. Meanwhile, in other parts of the state, temperatures rose into the 70s this weekend.
The heather is blooming, soon the witch hazel will, too. And from the looks of it, the daffodils will be early this year.
It’s not so much early spring as lack of winter. It’s the new normal.
Discussing seasonality with a Millennial:
“Why can’t you buy eggnog year round?”
“Because it’s a holiday thing.”
“But if you like it so much, why not drink it all year?”
Because life is not about the words but the space around them. Because music is not about the sound but the silence, too. Because eggnog tastes better when you sip it only a few weeks a year.
The lesson is lost, though. This is a generation raised on winter strawberries and music you download instantly and sometimes for free from the Internet. They do not save dimes and quarters and trudge up to Wheeler’s Drugstore to buy a single.
For them, there is no time between action and reaction. They don’t yet realize that can be the sweetest time of all.
A few days ago we basked in the mellow sun of late autumn, leaves falling slowly, desultorily, to earth. But arriving home on the back edge of the west wind, I find a cold, winter landscape in its place.
The stubborn leaves have finally fallen. Trees are gray and bare. All gone, all gone, the wind sighs. It is easy to feel bereft.
I remember the times of fullness. What is left after the last piece of pie. All gone then, too. But isn’t that the point?
It’s a harvest holiday, of course, planned for a time of bounty. But it arrives during a season of stripping down, of bare trees and chastened skies. The hills yesterday on our drive through the mountains, they are purple in the distance, no longer green or orange.
When all else is peeled away there is the essential, gratitude. Thanksgiving — what one does too often in between times.
The motion is hypnotic, timeless. An outstretched arm, the curve of a rake’s end the arm’s extension, reaching forward to gather what has fallen.
As I work my heart stills. There is progress, measured in leaves corraled, bags stuffed, sticks broken and tied.
My eyes look up to a swirl in the sky.
I’m not the only busy one.
A niggling wind has frisked the Kwanzan cherry and now, on the green grass, lies a pile of gold.
The first day of winter is still weeks away, but this feels like the real thing: Cold and light earlier than usual, the low temps not part of the night but part of the day. Just so there can be no mistaking.
I notice the silence. The robins and jays have left us; the juncos have not yet arrived.
The shutters are closed, but I spy through cracks the flicker of branch stir outside, as a brisk breeze sets treed leaves a trembling.
Here in this quiet hour, clocks ticking again on standard time, I think, resignation is much like this — to crave long days and fireflies, yet know even in my longing that this is what must be.
Today is Halloween and the birthday of the English poet John Keats, who described autumn as a “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.”
After two stormy days that were much closer to Percy Shelley’s depiction of the season —”O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being” — I slip back into Keats’s quiet vision. Autumn as a time of reflection and poetry, of observation and even of revelation.
Here is my favorite Keats poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:
| Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, | |||||||||||||
| And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; | |||||||||||||
| Round many western islands have I been | |||||||||||||
| Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. | |||||||||||||
| Oft of one wide expanse had I been told | 5 | ||||||||||||
| That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne: | |||||||||||||
| Yet did I never breathe its pure serene | |||||||||||||
| Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: | |||||||||||||
| Then felt I like some watcher of the skies | |||||||||||||
| When a new planet swims into his ken; | 10 | ||||||||||||
| Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes | |||||||||||||
| He stared at the Pacific—and all his men | |||||||||||||
| Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— | |||||||||||||
| Silent, upon a peak in Darien. |