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November Question

November Question

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Warm Novembers confront us with a question: Is it the early darkness that makes the month gloomy — or the cold temperatures? Melville would say the latter, I think, at least he would if we take the famous opening lines of Moby Dick with its “damp, drizzly November in my soul” as proof of where the novelist stood on the matter.

For many of us, though, it’s not just the damp drizzle; it’s also the early darkness, the dying of the light. I saw this first hand in the parakeets yesterday. Lulled into autumnal complacency by the mid-70 temps, I brought the birds out onto the deck to share the glass-topped table with me as I worked. 

They were chattering and happy, doing their best to respond to wild bird calls … until the sun began slanting lower and lower in the sky.  Then, as if on cue, they quieted and calmed, began tucking their heads into their wings. 

Even when it’s warm, the early darkness has its way with us. 

Gathering Rosebuds

Gathering Rosebuds

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The weather gods have given us one more warm day, one more day to walk and bounce and write outside before the cold moves in. It could be 30 degrees cooler tomorrow than it is today.

I can hear the lawnmower outside. Does it only seem more fast and frantic because I’m feeling that way about making the most of this day?

The second bloom roses I’ve been enjoying brought this verse to mind:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Remembering Cold

Remembering Cold

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After months of high humidity, warm mornings and sultry afternoons, cooler weather has returned. At night temperatures are in the low 40s, and though sun drives us into splashy bright afternoons, the bones don’t completely recover from the morning lows. 

The first cold is always a shock: the way the air enters the nostrils, the need to feel warm merino wool against the skin, the return of layers, the chapping of lips and the drying of hands. 

You know the cold is out there in the summer, up there at the poles, or circulating in another hemisphere. And you feel whenever you step into a super-chilled supermarket. But you can’t step out of today’s cold. 

This is not the end of the warmth and humidity (it can’t be!) but a taste of what’s to come. And it makes me shiver, just thinking about it. 

Humidity

Humidity

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Humidity and dew points are meteorological variables that I’ve yet to fully understand. But I feel them and I see them and this time of the year that’s all that matters.

On after-dark walks with Copper I see dew glistening in the grass like so many diamond chips. Moisture lingers in the morning, so much so that the doggie comes back from his early constitutionals with tummy hair drenched by it. 

As the day heats up all this moisture becomes a weight I try to move with fans and shifts of posture and anything else I can come up with. Sometimes I give in and move inside. But mostly, I just live with it in the outside office I persist in inhabiting. Because it’s summer, and it’s humid, and before long it won’t be either.  

Blackberry Winter

Blackberry Winter

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Though the heat and humidity are building here, for the last few days it’s felt like Blackberry Winter, which is what I grew up hearing an early summer cold snap called. Curious about this expression, I just learned from the Farmer’s Almanac that it’s primarily a southern term used to describe a bout of chilly weather that happens when the blackberries bloom.

There are lots of words like this in my lexicon, though I’m not pulling others up right this minute, language that harkens back to the deep roots of my Kentucky childhood. These turns of phrase created a world view that was part lore, part poetry and only a small part reality. For instance, I recall few blackberry blooms in my neck of the woods. It’s only since I’ve lived in Virginia that I’ve been aware of when the blackberries bloom, which is, interestingly enough, right about now!

As for the weather, it won’t be cool much longer. Already the heat and humidity are building, the rain that fell yesterday becoming steam that rises from the lawn, aromatic and ever-so-slightly suffocating, too.

Rough Winds

Rough Winds

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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May 
And summer’s lease hath far too short a date.

So go the third and fourth lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which begins with the lines “Shall I compare thee to a summer day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

They’ve been in my mind lately as the brisk winds continue to blow and the gray clouds continue to blot out the sun. It’s been one of the coolest springs on record, and is beginning to bother me — not that there’s a thing I can do about it except try to see the positive side.

And that brings me back to Shakespeare. Because the buds, though shaken, are staying buds longer than usual. They aren’t flowering and fading as quickly as they would if our temperatures were topping 80 each day.

A cool spring may try the patience of one who loves warm weather, but it will, for a few days at least, keep time at bay.

(If the bottom photo looks blurry, it’s because the wind was indeed shaking these fully bloomed knockout roses.) 

Not Complaining

Not Complaining

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Somehow, there is still moisture in the sky, and rain in the air. It’s falling now in gentle sheets, greening the new leaves and the grass and the weeds, making us feel more hemmed in than we already do.

Not that I’m complaining. There’s a roof over my head, and the basement doesn’t flood every time it rains, only in downpours. There’s electricity so I can turn on lamps in the morning (something I’ve very much needed to do this gray day).

And in the kitchen, just steps away from where I now sit (on a comfy new couch, I might add), there is more food than we know what to do with.

So I will take this rainy day, embrace it and even (in my own way) celebrate it. Because that’s where we are now … or at least it’s where I hope to be.

(Sunrise on the Mekong … from the vault.)

Meteorological Assist

Meteorological Assist

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Where I live we have an ally in quarantine, a meteorological assist. Most every day, it rains. And what regulations might not accomplish, weather does.

Yesterday, for instance, we had about six hours of full-on spring sun. Balmy blue skies, no clouds or gloom — and there were lots more people and cars on the road, a sense of everyone bursting from confines.

This morning, though, I awoke to the pitter-patter of rain on the roof. We’re expected to have a deluge by noon. The greenery will become even greener.

It will be easy to be inside today. Which is one day closer to being out.

Wind Storm?

Wind Storm?

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Just as light and weather have assumed new importance in life — since I see so much more of them working at home — so have the sounds I hear outside. Lately this has included sirens, chain saws and howling winds.

You can’t blame the virus for the last two. They come with the season, which is unsettled, changing, one day balmy, the next day frigid. Two nights ago a terrible storm blew up in the wee hours. It sounded like the derecho I remember from years past, with its scream of a freight train barreling down on us, saying “take cover, take cover.” The next day I awoke to the sound of chain saws whirring. Luckily, we were spared this time, but I counted more than a half dozen homes in the neighborhood with downed trees.

This morning I couldn’t tell if what I heard was the lumbering of the garbage truck or another storm howling in from the west. Then I realized that it’s Friday, the new (lone, weekly) trash pickup day. Ah, the relief at this realization. Knowing that it was not another wind storm, knowing that the foe we fight today is “only” the invisible one, the microbe — that it’s not the weather, too.

Acoustic

Acoustic

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How to catalog the sounds of the walk I took this morning? The crunch of stiffened grass, the swish of my parka as I strolled through the chill. The pounding of my feet on frozen ground.

It’s been for the most part a warm, gray, sodden winter. But today it’s blue skies and brisk air.

Most of all, it’s the music of the a frosty morning.