September
From a Floyd County Almanac, a book-with-images in progress—by Fred First
What We Leave Behind
The knees of my khakis are dark-wet from kneeling to pick long green pods still holding crystal drops from a passing shower before first light. I lift two heavy buckets of green beans fresh from the garden onto the kitchen sink. Soon the hiss and rattle of the canner will proclaim the fact we’ve reached the end-purpose of our gardening commitment, even as the rising sun spreads cool shadows west across the pasture.
There is a deep contentment in such harvest. A gardener at such times claims the right and feels bound by the pleasant obligation to simply sit and savor the wholeness of the cycle now complete: seed to sprout, vine to fruit, and finally at last, from gathering bowl to pressure canner to Mason Jar to storage shelf.
And so with my part done, I sit on the front porch swing, the rural liturgy begun in April now complete. I look out across the brief, low-hanging valley fog of an early September morning. Goose Creek glints in the sun, its percussive babble in rough synchrony to the rise and fall the last of the swallowtails.
At satisfied moments like this when all seems well with the world, I think how fine it would be if I could only hand this day whole, this season, this time and place in my life like a runner’s baton to the next generation, our children and theirs, who will inherit this same soil from which they might gather beans, occasional moments of peace and their daily living; that they might know freedom from want and the pleasures of toil and of harvest from a landscape to which they truly and with gratitude belong: that is my hope.
I think a good bit more about what comes when I’m gone than I once did. I feel a bit like the soon-to-depart house guest who wants to blunt the disruption his short visit has had on his hosts: before he leaves, can he help clean up the clutter he’s caused, restock the groceries eaten from the pantry reserves, and set the house aright before the next guests arrive? It just seems like good manners to consider these things in advance as my generation moves on.
But by our sheer numbers and especially by the affluence and effluence of our living, I and my fellow guests here on earth will leave the accommodations in a significantly less durable state of order when we move on than when we moved in just after the second World War.
Those future generations I wistfully imagined knowing the world of their day from my front porch won’t simply by default expect to maintain the status quo, nor can they be satisfied to pattern their lives after the appetites or error of our generation.
Our children’s children will have the new challenges of much, much more expensive energy costs in a very crowded world where disrupted weather patterns and climate shifts will prevail.
But they can still have honorable and meaningful lives. They can experience an adequate standard of living. But the standards, the scales by which we have measured the goodness of our existence, are going to have to be quite different from the Baby Boomer expectations and entitlements that have been the norms my generation have known.
And strangely enough, as I consider what it might take to set things right, many of those new standards of how we must treat the earth and each other may be the old measures of right behavior that guided our grandparents’ lives: consider how you treat the least of your fellow men; bigger barns aren’t always better; it is more blessed to give; think of others more highly than yourselves; love your neighbor; be the servant of all; invest your talents, and be good stewards.
In the end, if we set our hearts and minds on the matter now, we can leave a legacy of improving health for earth’s people and creatures, the air and soil, forests and oceans—a transformation that can only come from a marriage of humility and wisdom with knowledge and ingenuity. I hope my great grandchildren on Goose Creek will look back and acknowledge this as their inheritance from my generation.
Walnuts and Waxwings
It is September because the walnut leaves, yellowing for a couple of weeks, now begin to flutter on their long axis from high up in the big tree near the barn, easily reaching as far as the garden, on a southeast wind, before they come down to Earth. The eddies of the seasons’ tropical depressions and hurricanes gently brush away the foliage, first to fall, that was the last to arrive among the deciduous clan back in the spring.
The walnuts gather their things to go when they hear the grackles anxious indecision overhead in late August. And seeing the walnuts ready to go, the striped maples and hickories won’t tarry long. In two months, the party will be over, with the exception of the marcescent beeches, that do their best to be the very last out the door. By the first of November, the place will be littered with faded red and yellow and ochre remnants of yet another photosynthetic season come to a close.
It is September because the cedar waxwings, nowhere to be seen until the walnut limbs are prepared just so, have come to watch from the balding branches. They sit nervously, and from their perches launch themselves in fidgety boomerang flight towards nothing in particular, thirty yards out and back, more times than not, to the very same branch they just left.
Early in their migration, they nag in whispy voices like small kids in the back seat, not far at all into a long journey. Are we there yet? They keep engines revved at fast-idle, and false-start, expecting the starter’s gun again and again. Occasionally, they’ll snag a beetle on the wing, but more for sport than to fill their bellies. Berries do that work.
In our mountains, given the dearth of juniper (the cedar from which they got their name) these sleek birds instead will eat, digest and do us no favor by spreading the fruits of invasive Japonese honeysuckle. I have to wonder if they don’t also enjoy the silver-flecked red berries of the everywhere and rapidly-spreading Autumn Olive that is taking over entire pastures between home and town.
Waxwings have one of the fastest digestive systems of all birds, and can eat a berry now, and poop it onto my car parked beside the garden in twenty minutes. Their aim seems to be very good indeed.
When Leaves and Wardrobes Change
Along about the middle of September is when the shorts go up and the scarves and gloves, long-johns and heavy socks come down—almost always prematurely, but I try to keep my mouth shut. The ant jumps the gun while the grasshopper suggests we have more warm weather coming, dear. He is almost always right, but she wears the long-johns anyway if the calendar says it’s September. Why take any risks? Prevailing theory holds that her seasonal reflexes are triggered more by shorter days than cooler ones.
I confess to a secret thrill when first reunited in mid-September with my heavy-canvas Carharrt jacket with chain saw dust still in the pocket, and even more so, my thinsulate-lined Elmer Fudd earflap hat. The thrill wears off rather quickly, so I try not enjoy the novelty on that first pass.
I will miss the summer mornings with the windows open wide all night, lulled by the creek’s chuckle, the trill of toads and screech owls, and wind in the treetops. It has only been a matter of a couple months since the first warm mornings of late June. I’d swing my legs out of bed and realize I am already dressed comfortably for the first dark hours in my boxer shorts and t-shirt alone. There is a primitive freedom in living in just ones skin. But it is a short-lived freedom in summer, later that same day, and especially as our modern summers are increasingly not for sissies.
When summer afternoons overwhelm our air conditioning (the shade of five large maples) as happens on more days with each passing summer, and it grows too still and sticky inside and I have already shed down to a minimum, I reach a point where I can’t take off any more to thermoregulate. The only further aid is to pant and to cuss and to find outdoor shade and maybe s light breeze until sundown. I am also inclined to fall in the creek during such times, abetted and often encouraged by the dog.
In winter, you suit up the first minute, before your cold feet hit the cold floor, as if preparing for a space-walk. And you keep adding layers as the day gets colder and the days get shorter, until it feels right. In winter, you can almost always put on just enough clothes, I say. At least those of us from Mars think this is so. The Venusians shiver while sitting three feet away from a roaring wood stove.
September only hints at wardrobe molts yet to come before the first insincere warm spell of March will play a similar trick on us, and we box up our warm woolies and wish we had waited. She has her seasonal shifts, I have mine, and thankfully, every creature with whom we share this hemisphere is hardwired to make ready for the cold desert of winter. And I am thankful for four distinct seasons here, having just one—summer—in my home state of Alabama.
The Threat and Promise of Winter
Though a few poetic souls and tree-hugging types like me will offer quiet, sincere soliloquys on the magic and challenge of the coming of fall, for most of my fellow humans, from a practical, survival point of view, autumn really connotes not much more inconvenience than putting on warmer slippers of a morning. Homo has found divers ways to sidestep the potential loss of body heat when the planet in our half of the world tips away from the heat source for six months. Those evasive measures are called food, clothing and shelter.
We simply turn up the thermostat if the winds howl and chill factors slip towards zero, supplementing our body heat with fossilized sunlight in propane or coal. We reach for the afghan granny made when we were born and toss it over our shoulders while we type, all the while drinking steaming hot cocoa that warms us, bellies outward. Rather than adapt our physiology like most animals must do, we remake the world to suit our frail mostly-hairless hides.
Except for complaining, humans mostly ignore the coming of colder, shorter days, while every other northern hemisphere living species—every single one—plant, animal and other—will only still be around from fall to the next spring and from one eon to the next if it has learned its own survival tricks against the challenges that cold brings.
Water in living tissue freezes, and juices don’t flow from root to shoot. Freezing kills exposed cells, water expanding as it cools. Metabolism slows to a halt when the mercury falls since enzymes and other catalysts refuse to work fast enough below a certain fixed temperature. The whole living world might die of exposure. Autumn forebodes a serious change of plans.
Leave town, the birds say: go to the beach! And they gather early and debate loudly their intentions, starting in September. Drain the radiator, cry the broadleaved trees, and abort the solar panels; they won’t do much good when days are short. Dig! Bury yourself in the mud, under bark, deep in the cleft of an overhanging rock, in the hollow of a canker in a big walnut in the shelter of the valley. Find food now, say the rodents—oily nuts, fat-rich seeds, calorie-dense stuff that won’t spoil. Hoard it, starting when the green fades, and forget picnics on the lawn until the last snow has melted away. Go into a chilled slumber in a safe place, and stir only after the soil warms and the creeks thaw. Winter is coming! Make ready!
That autumn comes once more is written in the stars, a matter of cosmic routine, and we, every one, aware or not, join an orchestrated cosmic choreography that has a part in it for us.
The first tendrils of wood smoke from the chimney on a September morning and the green and red and gold Mason jars of summer’s produce in the cellar are signs that those within this household have believed the signals that have told us since early August: it is time to make ready.
We join the procession, the turning of the great wheel that will keep the sun low in the south for six months, to give the other half of the world’s creatures their spring. It’s only fair. Now, we relinquish our long days and summer wardrobes to autumn alchemy that will transform toad and tulip poplar, cedar waxwing, goldenrod and wingstem, raven and rat snake, and us—to our winter selves, whatever movement or metabolism that might require. To all of our fellow creatures who share our local habitat and calendar—see you on the other side.
The September of our Lives
We have passed the equinox now, so the brief equality of day and night length is shifting towards longer nights until December. Maybe that is why many think of fall as a melancholy time of year, the dark night of the soul. I never have. Some suffer short-day depression in the winter. If anything, it is the long oppressive days of summer that sap my joy of life, and it is the shorter, cooler, leaf-falling days of September that restore my drive, and give me back a sense of purpose and mission. The working days of summer are truncated by heat, gardening and yard work tolerably undertaken only as early and late-day activities. Even if the days are shorter now by clock hours, there is more useable daylight when mornings and late afternoons (at 4 o’clock) are a cold that you can dress for, and the days stay warm enough at noon to work at the wood stacks with my long sleeves rolled up.
While I heap praise on autumn, at the same time here in the September of my life I feel my own firmament shifting subtly through a kind of emotional equinox, admitting some early deviation away from anticipation and towards dread, come the first signs of fall. At some point, it will likely be the winters towards which autumns hint, whose demands and risks become the tipping point that triggers our own migration away from independence, out, down, south, towards climate control and other forms of dependent living.
Until then, we will carry on, even if the carrying requires ibuprofen and a certain amount of whining. Let the season commence, as there is nothing we can do to hold it back. Gentlemen, start your wood stoves!
Out back and down beside the driveway are stacked five or six cords of hardwood. Once, I would have found on our own property, cut, split and stacked every bit of such a reserve. But a few years back, I made the concession to my manhood that buying firewood by the dump truck load imposed, and have not been entirely sorry. I miss the former fact that for most pieces of wood I loaded into the stove, I could have told you when and where the tree had lived, then succumbed to beetles or blight or blow-down in a wind or ice storm. Anonymous place-less wood heats us well, but does not warm me in just the same way.
Even so, there is plenty enough work just in keeping the wood rings on the back porch filled for the next day or the three-day snowstorm on its way, and the old toy chest full of “twigs.” The former is my job, the latter, Ann’s. Scouting the valley for twigs begins in September.
You might think that just any small stick will do for starting a morning’s fire. (I would agree.) But for some of us with higher standards, such tolerance of mediocrity will not do at all. For a twig snob, most fallen small limbs and branches will be rejected. Preferred are tulip poplar branches of approximately one inch in diameter, not ready for the porch receptacle until all the long stringy bark has been removed. At this point, they are uniformly a dull, smooth white, and suitable for foil wrapping and gift-boxing for the special someone. Or so I tease the resident Twigess, even while happily gathering a big bundle on a cold fall morning for the tiny fire we will let die soon after lighting it on a cool but not yet cold day ahead.
The other looming challenges ahead include snow and ice storms, dangers of travel, and power outages—all risks we have been prepared to take on in the past age of full capacity, task-competent and able-bodied. Here on the long-night side of life, those capabilities are already becoming less reliable, and the shorter days now remind us it is time to prepare. Make ready. Store up nuts and seeds. Throw another purchased log on the fire. Sign up for Medicare. Warn the children that we’re soon to follow the song birds down-mountain, migrating toward thermostats as the walnut leaves fall and the long-johns find their way down from upstairs.
