I often write here about this season or that season—Siberian blue quill season or the beginning of the swimming season. It’s tamarack season now, great gold evergreen torches among bare branches. Yet, balmy, balmy. Busy, busy, at work, my desk between an open window and the door that leads into the hall where people come and go, all day long. Midday, I slip out wordlessly, walk to the lake where the quietness matches my mind. The summer people have all gone now.
In the evening, warm as spring with the darkening light true to November, a crazy mixed-upness, I restlessly walk around the village, my usual walking companions elsewhere, out of touch. The night falls quickly, and here’s another thing I’m grateful for: to generally not fear the dark. Lord knows, there’s plenty else we each fear.
On a bridge over the Lamoille River, I pause for the longest time, mesmerized by the gloaming light, the crickets still murmuring in a nearby field, by the swirl of people. For no particular reason at all but that low river flowing over stones, its hue shifting and flickering, I remember reading Norman Maclean so many years ago, as a young woman, the summer I lived in a tipi in a field of wild blueberries.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ― Norman Maclean
I rarely show my face here, a few author or event photos, myself in New Mexico a summer ago, in a dress patterned with lemons I’d bought for my oldest daughter, the photo she took of me in a hospital elevator, two days before surgeons took a scalpel to my belly and cut.
Here, on the advent of yet another stick season, I paused and snapped photos of my reflection in the dirty windows of a nearly abandoned town grange. Two in one post? How’s that for nonsensical? November, a season I’ve often met with dread. This year, a welcome respite, the lengthening nights that encourage waking in the darkness, as in a secret. Finally, after a struggling summer, I’m writing hard about grief and illness, death’s foggy abyss, fear. My youngest had just headed to college, the sting of her absence barely scabbing over, when I was overcome with cancer, and my daughters flocked back. Now, we are all well, all healthy, so I am learning again to live without what Tillie Olsen called moving according to the rhythms of others. The deep pleasure of connecting with old friends, the sweetness of new people that chance and writing and disease have brought my way.
November is the twilight’s gloaming beauty, the sharpening of cold, warmth of woodstove, the pleasure of light. I’ve lucked upon reading the Lieke Marsman, who writes:
Are there writers who can succeed without melancholy?
Late autumn means shortening days which means a reacquaintance with darkness. In sooty twilight, I slip through the narrow path in the pines and into the cemetery, a letter in my hand. Quickly, night settles in.
At the bottom of the hill where this back street joins Main Street, an elderly man leans against the railings on a second-floor landing. The storefront has six apartments above it, and the tenants linger on the covered back stairs in all weather, all times of the year. I pause, and we talk about the balmy fall, the fattening half moon. Then I wish him a good evening and head along.
In the way of small towns, I know pieces of his story—he’s a veteran who served in a war that may seem forever ago, or perhaps just a few breathfuls of air in the past—and he may know snippets of my life, too. I drop my letter in the mailbox and circle through the village. Darkness settles in, and I follow the sidewalk home, not tromping through the woods and the cemetery. Save for passing cars, there’s no one out, house windows filled with people moving about their chores. Ordinary evening under the splendid night sky.
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.” ― Alan Watts
Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.
In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.
My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.
“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.” ― Niall Williams
Asters I planted in my garden, withstanding first frosts.
More indicative, perhaps, would be this:
Darkness lies deeply on each end of the day, cats rising hours before dawn to eat, myself to weld that fork and open my laptop. Afternoons wind down into early darkness. A friend and I walk through spits of rain, wander along Main Street, jammed with locals and leaf peepers, negotiate the two empty stools at a long bar, where she drinks beer and I drink club soda, eating the pip of lemons.
What does time matter? It might be six or ten, maybe nearing midnight. Night presses against the wide windows, as if hungry.
Later, walking home, the air touches my face with its scents of diesel and rotting leaves, woodsmoke. Every year, this pause. The need to gather coats, who needs new boots? and where are the mittens?, the price of snow tires, the aligning of ash buckets, the necessity of socks. All that long winter I was sick, I couldn’t navigate the porch steps and the ice by myself, darkness relegated to my windows. Only in those rushing nighttime drives to Dartmouth Hitchcock did I know the constellations arced overhead, Ursa Major, the gleaming Pleiades, the scrap of cold on my lips. How I missed this.
I hole up at my kitchen table to work, then go for a run in the late afternoon, then circle back to work. This work is a spreadsheet where I’m sewing and ripping out and stitching again numbers and more numbers. Numbers that signify things and actions. I use my same writing approach: ask questions (what does this mean?), be precise, question myself, care about what I’m doing.
Early October. I veer off my running path and wander along the seam of fallow field and riverbank. Geese wing south, honking. Inexorable.
I grew up in New Hampshire. Autumn, how apples on the trees smell both sweet and rotting, reminds me of childhood, when time meant nothing. Now, one of my oldest friends arrives for dinner, and she shares her retirement plan, a number not-so-far in the distance. She taught me the name of the flower closed gentian. I haven’t seen her in weeks, yet she sits down, and we pick up, talking. Inexorable, the motion of this material world.
In this dry spell, the river runs low, unkempt, crammed with human debris. Wild and human intersect: shorn cornfield, wild asters, bridges, the eagles I’ve spied here, all summer. I keep thinking not of those numbers and the mathematical patterns of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, but of a recent New Yorker essay about writing and illness, the flimsiness of words in the wake of wrenching pain. Words upon words. The signifier and the signified. I crouch down and tie my shoe. Overhead, all that sky. Underfoot, the immensity of earth. I’ve five things I think I should be doing. The geese slice through the afternoon, then vanish, leaving me in this dusty field. The slow spin of this planet.
Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now?
…. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
