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. |
Afternoon quickly turns to evening these days, and if I walk a little later than usual, the moon is my companion. It was so yesterday, a pale half, and beside it in the sky, a tangle of contrails.
The balmy air, the early evening and the usual group of dog walkers and fishermen out in Franklin Farm Meadow. But someone else, too. A woman with a camera stood by the pond and aimed her lens at the sky.
I followed her glance upward, and saw the clouds and contrails mingle in the afterglow. The sky continued to redden as I made my way home. By the time I reached Folkstone, it was a radiant pink. Not unlike the maple leaves that are almost, not quite, at their peak.
In summer the forest is dark and cool; ferns stir slightly, like ancient fans, and the ripple of a distant spring promises relief from the sizzling pavement.
In winter and spring the woods are open and bare but still not what you would call bright. The trees are pale sentinels and what greenery there is keeps its head to the ground.
But in autumn —ah, in autumn — the woods are all lit up from the inside, and entering them feels like walking into a party that has been going on for some time. The forest makes its own light this time of year. Each tree is an engine; the leaves are its fire.
Walking in the woods on a bright afternoon, the light is all around me. I don’t want to let it go.
Midway through October, gold outweighs green, leaves sift slowly earthward through the canopy.
Walnuts drop beside the road, their pungent green shell eroding, revealing the hard black fruit inside.
Leaves are falling but have not yet become the enemy. That will happen soon.
Until then, I see not the perils of fall — but the poetry.
The rains have come and the clouds too, and together they have taken us to a new season. We wake to chill and enter the day in darkness.
In the evening, errands once run in warm dusks are now undertaken in cold nights.
The signs have all been there, I tell myself, but I’ve ignored them. I have chosen to believe (as hot seasons always make me do) that summer is eternal.
And nothing, not the bluest autumn sky or the crispest scarlet leaf, can make it right again.
What consoles me: lamplit evenings, bowls of chili, no yard work, fires on the hearth, low sunlight slanting through tall windows, the knowledge that months pass quickly and soon it will be spring again.
And so we come to the end of September. Evenings are chilly; birds are still. The equinox has come and gone. Warmth is no longer something to be feared but something to be coaxed and welcomed. We start at brisk and work our way to warm. Only at the end of a golden, blue-sky afternoon are we there: a perfect, spun-gold, fall day.
Thirty days hath September.
Is there no way to wrangle a few more?
I checked my email and learned from the Writers Almanac that the autumnal equinox occurs today at 10:49 a.m. — only to glance at my computer clock and see … 10:49 a.m.
We are perfectly poised now between sunlight and shadow, between darkness and light, our days and nights equal halves of the same whole, like the beginning and end of a beloved book, each part integral to what we love, ultimately, for its completeness.
I write outside, a brisk wind blowing. As I type, a single leaf floats down and lands on my keyboard.