Is Fall My Favorite Season?

Jerry went ahead of me into the lodge where we would eat lunch. “Let me tromp around a bit with my camera. I’ll meet you inside in half hour or so,” I had said to him.

Beams of noonday sun danced among newly fallen leaves, fiery orange and yellow. Acorns and pine cones and wispy weeds with seed heads of harvest lay spread about, and I reflected again: autumn is my favorite season . . .but again there is majestic winter . . .the pulsing bud of spring . . .the languid sweet days of summer . . .

And you? What is your favorite season? Can you decide?

Pennsylvania Trip–Part 3 Rust and Pods

Well may you ask the connection between rust and pods, and further may you question the significance of a post about either of them. And I confess, I have no answer, except that something about each class intrigues me. What is it? The passage of time with its connection with our own lives? Durability? The charm of the flawed?

Near one of the stores where we shopped yesterday was an ancient gasoline pump. Broken. Rusted.  Beautiful. Its sides were pitted with decay.

In a clump beside the old pump was a stand of yellow flowers (black-eyed susans?) that with a flourish had shot up the side of the flawed metal.        .

   Its brand was legible.     Nearby in the things of rust was a fence.Chains and iron of decay.

Pods abound here on my brother’s property. I’m enchanted..

Mountain Prowling with Winston

On Thursday I went to the dentist twice! Broken tooth, crown problem! Bad news. $$$

Friday we had a couple of workmen scheduled to be at our home; one who could clean carpets, the other who would caulk around our large windows off the front deck.

“I think Winston and I will be gone,” I told Jerry. “We’ll prowl around the mountains, do a little leaf-chasing, shops . . . such as that.”

We did, and though I never forget, the day’s sights caused me to remember again how blessed I am to live in this stunning part of the world.

Lake Arrowhead seen from North Shore Road.

Over the blue water and the marina below the magnificent tree beside which I stood extended a slender limb laced with orange and yellow leaves.

Winston wore his red tie to celebrate as we made our rounds.

Ah. A couple of hours such as these make it easier to endure the painful, mundane, unwelcome parts of life. Clears our thinking, focuses our vision, eases the tremble of our hand and of our soul.

God made it. Spoke the word. There it stands.

Ballet in the Woods

A movement on the rock–rock color, except that it moved, and I saw the scamper of tiny lizard. So small he was, I thought I might have stumbled onto a reptile maternity ward, for surely he must have only just cracked through his tiny egg. I read, too, that lizards may hatch early if a loud rumble or a heavy vibration circles up around the egg, and a sense of danger, the chance of predator, pervades. I hope I had not set up a rumble as I trudged up the small hill into the woods at the end of our street. Surely I did not cause a premature lizard birth this September morning–a morning of perfection, warm, with a faint brush of chill that had seen me to the closet for the first time this season to take out my jacket of lightest weight. I angled down my camera, but he was swift, and escape and hiding were encoded in his ancient reptilian brain, and anyway, he had escaped his crib already, and then he was at the side of the rock, and down, then into the thick grasses . . . and gone. I had not snapped my shutter, of such quickness were his movements.

The low grasses wave, slender and graceful so that I see they are ballet dancers and the sunlight beams through their stems and fronds and highlights their heavy heads, heads that droop now with seed, precious seed, for therein is eternity. Unmistakable elegance, if one will pause long, and will stare at length; elegance, raw beauty, unmistakably a push against the dismissal of such as mere weeds.

The lizard, gone now, a skitter among the ballet.

Taking Up Autumn

They tell me the daytime hours and the nighttime hours are almost of the same duration on the day of the Autumn equinox, when our spinning globe, because of its slight tilt at the axis, waves in a new season. Now end the days of summer here in the northern hemisphere and we begin our steady approach toward winter. But today! it is fall . . . perhaps my favorite season. (Except that winter stuns me with its beauty, and spring bursting the earth in resurrection is astounding, and then there’s that languid warmth of summer and the lake and the birds . . . )

The ground over which I walk is familiar, and yet strange, for its paths now have lost the warmth of yesterday and my shoes must be of heavy sole to push against the fallen sticks and the acorns which fall from the oaks in abundance here in the San Bernardino mountains. Day and night we hear them–Jerry and I–as they lose their grip on their limbs, and a couple of times Jerry has been thumped, and once last week he said, “I would sit on the front deck with my coffee, but I’m afraid for my head,” for a breeze had struck through the trees. We drive our car over the long driveway to the sound of snare and the click of fine drum sticks. Jerry sweeps the deck and the driveway and sometimes blows the acorns down into piles where the driveway meets Wabern Court, and then he scoops them up with a shovel and ties up the heavy yard bag into which he has thrust them. I’m always wishing we could come up with a plan that would enable us to sell them by the gunny sack full, (but everyone around here has so many), or market acorn butter or wood floors for cabins. Something like that, but so far: Nothing. Except that years ago when my grandchildren were small and were up here visiting, I let them go to the neighbors and sell our exceptional acorns that look like little people wearing woody hats. “You can’t charge more than a nickle,” I instructed, as they stuffed them into plastic bags, and they came back grinning with quarters in their fists.

When I arose yesterday–the first day of fall–I peered at the thermometer which hangs outside my kitchen window and it read 43 degrees, a drastic drop from a few days before, as though the weather understood that the calendar had declared summer had ended. Our house is amazingly well-insulated, so it was not actually cold in here–67 degrees, I believe, but after he had been up for awhile Jerry said, “Want a fire?” And so the first fire of the season was laid and lighted, and as is my custom I gazed, entranced, into its flames and saw figures and dreams and had visions.

I’ve put away flimsy summery things, and last night before I went to bed, I removed the pink Chenille bedspread from the downstairs guest bed and replaced it with a much heavier covering, plus I’ve scrambled around in my cupboards exchanging out dishes. Now there probably is no such thing as fall and summer dishes, but during these days of early fall when I think of pumpkins and Indian corn, I get this urge to bring out my pottery, and to rub polish cloths against my copper pieces.

Jerry and I will be taking our morning walk in a few minutes. It’s been awhile since we ventured into the woods at the end of Wabern Drive, but today–already I can tell–the intrigue of that curving path aflutter with weeds and leaves and the marks of little creatures just may lure me into its ways.

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