dark

With no snow, our late autumn Vermont appears like coals burned out, none of our summer’s radiance, our snowy luminosity. This afternoon, not yet four, with the light already leaking away, I lay down in my daughter’s forest lair, dead logs propped up against an enormous white pine. While she wandered away, busily scavenging planks for a footbridge over a culvert with a running stream, I lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

The afternoon was extraordinarily still, with not even a stir of wind, a chatter of chipmunk. I smelled mud, that thick, humusy scent of forest floor opened up. Still waiting, I opened my eyes and, through a part in the branches overhead, saw three crows traveling across the gray, cloudy sky, their wings steadily flapping, quite possibly not at all disturbed by the night falling down and the dearth of glow. And that, perhaps, might be the flight of autumn across our sliver of the world.

A lone crow
sits on a dead branch
this autumn eve

— Basho

Driving with my daughter this afternoon, she remarked that time seemed out-of-whack — like the day had already progressed to after-dinner time, when really it was late afternoon. I told her the longest day of the year is nearly here. Rain, this summer, has been a steady and weighty companion.

In the woods, the greenery is profuse, the ground sodden mud, everything suffused with a moist verdancy. Mulching in the garden this afternoon, I was quickly wet, but, working, I warmed quickly, and my garden world was rich with scents: wet rock, rotting compost, blossoms.

Any visitor to Vermont, throw out that postcard image of red barn with cupola, Holsteins, babbling brook. Go deep into the woods, into the darkest, most concealed and forebidden place, and lay your hands on what’s there.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

–– Robert Frost

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Autumn Dusk

Summer Woods