Yesterday the skies were grey and the air calm. A sense of cold was in the little puffs of breeze, when they occurred. I took my 8 foot fiberglass dinghy out to the river and put her in the marsh, at the canoe launch. The only thing disturbing the surface of the water was me and my oars. All the Cattails stuck up 12 feet high from the hassocks, making the marsh into a maze. They were reflected perfectly in the water so that they seemed to grow down, as well as up and the mirrored halves floated, both in the sky and the water.
After rowing for a few hours the cold, moist air started to get inside me. As I rowed back to my start, a bald eagle flew low above me and headed toward one of the little islands back in the marsh that has tall trees where they like to make nests for the winter. It's good to see them back for the winter.
Back at the house the wood stove drove most of the damp cold feeling out of me. The house smelled of the soup I'd left on the stove to slow cook. A bowl of soup drove out the last of the cold.
In the evening the rain began just as I was stacking the wood I'd split earlier in the morning. A few hours later the rain turned to the first snow of the season. In the morning the ground was wet and a bit frozen in little patches, but mostly wet. The thermometer read 29'f.
The stove will stay burning for the foreseeable future now that the temps are only supposed to top out in the low 40's and at night bottom out below freezing. The stove will always have a kettle on for tea and more often than not a pot cooking up a soup. We looked for our winter wear this morning, pulling it down from the attic. It's hats and gloves from now on.
So, we have once again crossed over to a new season, with a much more tangible and real event than just some words and numbers printed on a calendar. The light of day doesn't last as long and I feel a need to use the light of each day as best I can. I know in this age of jet planes and electric everything it might seem odd to limit oneself to the constraints of what is called natures rhythms, but I have found I am much happier for doing so to some degree. As we approach the Winter Solstice, now just about 5 weeks away, and the sun treats us like a friend or lover who has grown bored with us and is avoiding us, I will become ever more desperate feeling about the length of the nights and the shortness of the day and the seeming permanence of the cold. But I know that if I took my sextant and measured the height of the sun in the sky I could see that come late December the old sun would remember us here and start to spend a bit more time with us every day. This is what gets me thru the fading of the light and the coming of the cold. It is a solid unchangeable thing, all this change, not as contrived as "daylight savings time". It is a gradual adjustment that doesn't catch me off guard if I forget to change your clocks. It is almost as if it takes place within me as much as around me. Like the difference between walking somewhere, or, taking in a plane. I've never heard of any body suffering jet lag from walking somewhere.
Maybe it has a little to do with being born in the Fall, doesn't really matter though, but I have always preferred this time of year. Even though one of my greatest joys, sailing, is best done in the summer, I have always felt more in tune with Autumn. Because it is a transition season it has a changeable quality to it. Change becomes it's character, just as warmth and sun is summer's character, and cold and frost are winter's. To me this is the most familiar thing, change, I have only ever known it really, and I have learned to appreciate it's ability to make everything new just as it is also taking everything old away. Isn't this really our state of being in this life. If we aren't changing then how can we say we are living.
By the height of the sun in the sky we would say this is still Fall, but we have crossed over to the quality of winter and that quality will grow and increase each day. It will eventually feel like it might not ever end and I will long for the air to have some warmth to it. My brain will tell me that it won't last forever, that Spring will eventually arrive but a part of me won't much believe it. But that time is not yet here and now there are still a few more leaves on the trees that are too stubborn to let go, but the cold and the wind and the ice and snow will wear them down, right down out of their trees.
I now start my "keeping of the watch". This is what happens when the stove needs to be fed every 4 to 6 hours, around the clock. I start to wake up in the middle of the night hours, just before the embers wink out and I put more wood in the stove. Some might say that not getting more R.E.M. sleep might have negative affects on me but as I have gotten older sleep doesn't seem to be something I require in much more than 4 hour chunks of time anyway. Sailors used to keep these kind of schedules for much longer than the 5 or 6 months that I do. Besides, I look forward to the first snow storm that blows thru over night, if for no other reason than to sit up as I have, slippers on, robe wrapped tight sitting right next to the wood stove watching, first the flames, then, the snow falling outside. The quite during a night time snow seems like it has settled over the entire world, like a big down comforter has been pulled over our heads as we snug down into our beds. I'd rather be awake to witness that, so tending the fire is not so much a chore as a chance to be up and have the world to myself for a moment.
I know that some will think how awful it is to have to be slave to keeping myself and my home warm thru the cold season. It isn't so awful at all, as anybody who lives thru it will tell you. I remember growing up in a place that didn't really have much change between seasons. The lack of change just seems so distasteful to me now. I imagine that it might make the changes in me as I age, surprising, making me think, "where did the time go, how did I get to be old". Where as here I feel constantly aware of the marching of time, and my life, and this has nothing to do with a calendar or clock, it is all around me, it is me.
We each have our places and ways that make us most comfortable. Where you are it may not seem any different today than yesterday, even though it truly is. Here today is different from yesterday, it is now the cold season here. Happy Autumn, Holiday season, or what ever you celebrate.
