Seasonal Attire Disorder

How is it that I am never prepared for the seasonal change? It isn’t that the weather hasn’t given due notice. For weeks the evening air has had a slight chill to it. Mornings have been shrouded in fog if they’re not dripping with rain. The warmest part of the day is the middle, and even then, most evenings a sweater has not been amiss.

A few weeks after the traditional late August storm on whose heels trod the first breath of fall, I rounded up all my summer clothes and put them in a box. I hauled out all my winter clothes and put them in the closet. Two days later, the sun made a summer comeback and the humidity that I welcomed in July made me sweat in my turtleneck. I opened up the summer box, pulled shorts and tees back out, and stuffed them in amongst the woolies. The next day, the wind blew cold, the rains poured down, and I sat huddled in a tee shirt and two sweaters.

By evening, I had raided the trunk at the foot of the bed for my long winter bathrobe and my silk long johns. I resurrected my terrycloth bed jacket, found my ragg wool socks, and my winter slippers. I was contemplating dragging out the mitten box the next morning when the weather made another abrupt change. I went out of doors in my jeans and sweatshirt only to make a u-turn and go back in for a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts.

I’ve never perfected the art of layering, a dressing skill that would no doubt stand me in good stead in the changeable New England weather. The catalogs that come at this time of year (if they aren’t already shouting about what fun 20º below zero will be) mention pieces that “layer well,” but I get tired just thinking about all those clothes. If I put on an undershirt and a long sleeved tee shirt and a button down flannel shirt, (not to mention a sweater and a jacket), I’d look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. It’s not a fashion statement I want to make.

It amazes me that after spending most of my life in New England (where the old adage, “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute,” is learned at your mother’s knee), I still can’t manage to dress appropriately for the season.

Leaves for Eddie

Dawn followed close on the heels of the clackity boxcars, as if the train’s whistle had wakened the sun as well as my self. I stood on the doorstep in the cool, misty half-light watching a flock of noisy geese make its way to the pond. They are Canada geese winging down from the north. They will rest on our pond and eat their fill before pushing south to Maryland just ahead of the cold November winds. September weather has remained warm and muggy after a summer of heat and humidity. Even now, toward the month’s end, the sun still blazes and the temperature climbs into the 80s. Evenings cool a little but the dampness remains. The trees still wear their summer green, though here and there a few anxious maple leaves have gone scarlet. It is these leaves that lure me out on my bicycle to scour the roadsides for enough to send to Eddie.

Eddie used to live here in my town. We grew up together half wild, playing along the creek banks, the edges of the woods, and the broad meadows between his house and mine. Eddie had a pony and sometimes he rode that to my house. Other times we rode our bikes together down the road we shared. He lived at the southern end and I half way to the north end. Often after a day of play, I would walk Eddie nearly to his end of the street. He’d walk back with me as far as the brook near my house. I’d walk him to the railroad tracks, and he’d walk me back to the halfway mark – a chicken farm owned by an old maid and her widowed sister. Then we’d turn and wave as we made our way to our respective houses. It made our time together last longer.

Once we were in junior high school, Eddie and I went our separate ways, me to the local regional school and he to a private one. We saw each other infrequently until just a few years ago when he made a trip home from Kentucky where he’d finally settled. At first I didn’t recognize him. It had been so many years, after all. But then he laughed and the years fell away, and we began to talk as though it had been only yesterday that we’d walked each other home.

Now we keep in touch by mail, with me keeping Eddie abreast of changes large and small to the town he grew up in. He writes back, nostalgic notes filled with questions about people and places he once knew well. He promises to come home in the spring, and then in the summer, and finally, when the leaves turn color and fall in heaps and the wind from the north develops a bite, he promises that he will come the following spring. I’ve ceased looking for him. I can’t help but think of him though, as I pedal slowly down the road where his grandfather once had a farm. Lettuce for fancy local restaurants grows in the fields now and the old farmhouse stands empty, shipping crates piled on its sagging porch.

The maples that line the street drop orange and scarlet leaves at my feet. I scoop them up, iron them between sheets of waxed paper, and mail them off to Eddie. Perhaps they will lure him home. Perhaps in the spring.

Surrender

Dawn comes earlier these days and dusk settles over the pond far sooner than I’d like, but in between the days are filled with golden light. The trees at the far edge of the water are donning their fall colors. Suddenly the greenery of spruce and pine trees stands out, tucked as they are among the flaming maples and yellowing locusts. The air has a soft, waiting quality about it, though when a stray breeze blows it carries a touch of frost on its breath.

Acorns are dropping. They fall down through the canopy with sharp little cracks. Wild apples, too, are ripening and letting go, landing with soft thuds on the grass beneath abandoned trees. I leave the acorns to the squirrels but I polish the least wormy of the apples against the arm of my sweater and nibble slowly as I walk, always careful to make a close inspection before each bite. Wild apples always taste of sunlight and summer rain, as though both were stored just beneath the skin. Sometimes I can find enough unbruised fruit to make a pie or a batch of applesauce.

Geese are gathering on the pond every evening. They fly low over the road, their wings whispering, breaking the water’s glassy surface into brilliant shards as they land. They lift again in the morning when the mist is still thick, winging between it and the sun, only their voices revealing the secret of their flight. I hear them and feel my heart respond with an ancient yearning. I know the somber days will follow in their wake and I am reluctant to be left here to face the cold while the remains of summer are escaping on beating wings.

I am no longer wakened by bird song, though the crickets and summer bugs still sing me to sleep. When the late afternoon sun slants through the trees in transparent bands I can see innumerable insects dancing there, wings aglitter in the light as though each one were jeweled. I want to dance in the sunlight too, with jeweled wings that would lift me far and away.

Everywhere, the green and growing things are reluctantly letting go of their vibrancy. Grasses are turning buff and brown and sepia, corn stalks wave golden leaves, every tree save the evergreens boasts a different shade of crimson or yellow or orange. Milkweed pods grow thick as the leaves lose their green and with every breeze the colored remnants of summer swirl to the ground in surrender.

When I am tired of walking, I throw myself down in the crackling meadow grass, half drowsing in the warmth and silence, and watch the clouds tell shape-shifter stories. The rest of the world simply melts away and nothing is left but the moment – the sun and the grass and the wings and me.

Come September

The pond across the road from my house, dressed in its autumn best.







How did it get to be September already? Wasn’t it just June? Nobody asks that question in February. Nobody says, "Wasn’t it just January?" What is it about summer that speeds up time?

Perhaps it’s because in summer, things grow. They emerge, develop, and expand until the next thing you know, the tree leaves that were the size of squirrels’ ears in late spring have flattened and broadened enough so you can stand comfortably in their collective shade. Corn seeds planted in May produce elephant-eye-high plants by August. In just two July weeks, my zucchini grew from finger-length babies to whale-sized behemoths. Cut grass seems to spring up right behind the lawn mower, and flower stems pole vault their blossoms toward the sun.

In June, time begins to make itself visible, each day stretching out full-length, its fingers reaching toward an ever-earlier dawn while its toes extend toward an ever later dusk. We even say the day stretches out before us, as though we sense the languorous pose July assumes when the temperature and the humidity rise. Let things cool off a bit, let the day curl up on itself and retreat beneath a blanket of gray, and still dawn does not lag nor twilight hurry.

July is mid-summer, all buzz and bloom and business. Mornings are often misty, and as the sun comes up, I like to watch the wraith-like vapor rise from the trees and the riverbed like lazy ghosts who’ve slept on the floor and just realized they must be off and away. Noontimes are just plain hot. The shimmering heat builds over the afternoon into thunderheads that break with a loud crack, spilling rain into the evening hours.

Then, just as in snow-smothered January there comes a day that hints of spring, there comes a storm that breaks summer’s spell sometime in mid-August, when the heat has built to an unbearable sizzle and people and dogs alike pant. After that, the days begin to sit up a little straighter. They belt robes around their waists against the dawn chill and in the evening pull sweaters over their shoulders. So do I. Time becomes restless, hoarding the light to spill on other continents, leaving us, with each flip of the calendar page, in the dark a little longer.

Watching the seasons cycle, I realize that all that has been and all that will be is held in the moment at hand. Like a good book, nature gives us hints of what is to come in the beginning and middle of each seasonal chapter. And though I’ve heard it before, September is a story I want to read over and over.

Apple Time

It’s apple time, and that makes me think of Mama and how the kitchen smelled in the late afternoons of warm apples and cinnamon and buttery piecrust.

Mama was a wonderful cook. Her specialty was a foot high angel cake that always went first at church bakes sales but what I loved best were her pies. She had a light hand with pastry and a generous one with fruit. Her confections always looked like the one in the illustration for “Billy Boy” (Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?) in my Little Golden Songbook. In the picture, the delicately browned crust rounded up over a mound of cherries and steam swirled enticingly from two large vents cut in the crust. The sight of that pie always made me hungry.

Mama often baked a pie for Sunday dinner. It went into the oven on the shelf over the roast, and as it baked, the fruit juices would drip onto the meat, basting it delicately in apple or blueberry or blackberry juice. Other times she would make lemon meringue, deliciously tart and sweet at the same time, or chocolate cream, my father’s favorite. I could never wait until the pie cooled thoroughly; many a time I burned my tongue on scalding fruit or steaming custard.

If there was an abundance of apples at one time, Mama sauced some of them. Then she would make a second batch of pastry, roll it thin, trace the shape of a saucer in the dough with a sharp knife, and fold it over a generous spoonful of applesauce. She would let me dip a fork in the flour and crimp the edges. I happily sprinkled cinnamon and sugar over each turnover and could hardly wait until they were baked. Cooled and in hand, they were my favorite snack.

It’s been years since my mother and I worked together in the kitchen but it’s apple time, and in memory of her I am baking a pie. I’ve fetched her old paring knife from the drawer, taken my bowl of apples outside and pared a dozen of them while sitting on the dreaming bench in the late afternoon sunshine.

I’ve taken her old china bowl from the cupboard, the largest yellow one, and tossed the apple slices with flour and sugar and cinnamon. I’ve rolled the crust with her old green-handled wooden rolling pin, remembering the shape of her hands as she worked, and the look of her face as she blew a stray hair from her eyes.

The pie sits on the counter, redolent and delicately browned, steam spiraling from the vents cut in the top crust. It looks just like the pie in the “Billy Boy” song illustration. It looks just like a pie my mother might have made…and I have just burned my tongue.

Soapbox Rally

If we are not involved in our government, in it's elections, its decisions, and its policies, then we are not a free nation. If we are not an informed citizenry we cannot blame the press alone; if the press and our government use us, confuse us, trick us, lie to us, and keep information from us, we are as much to blame as they.

Here's one way we can do something about it. Go here (http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=o25T0BspJ7c) to hear Dan rather speak to the issue of a corporate-controlled press and here (www.freepress.net) to supplement your daily controlled news intake. As Mr. Rather points out, we need a press that "provides the raw material of democracy and the information to let us be full participants in a government of, by, and for the people."

For more information about media control read Deck Deckert's essay (http://www.swans.com/library/art8/rdeck022.html) or read some of the entries at http://mediamatters.org/

As of 2004, 5 huge corporations - Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) control most of the media industry in the U.S. How are they informing us and what are they not telling us? Are they the only news media you subscribe to, listen to, agree with?

Unless we ask, unless we protest, unless we claim the right to be well-informed and then make sure we are by reading every viewpoint, not just the ones we already agree with, how can we make truly informed decisions? We should ALWAYS question, ALWAYS search for our own reasons for believing what we're told, ALWAYS insist that we be involved in our government's decisions. It's what being free entails - responsibility. Our own.



photo credit: img179.imageshack.us/.../ 2383/freedomcopyzk6.jpg