November 26 - November 30 Seeing by Inner Light

                                       A handful of diamonds in the window box-(why I’m rich)

2010-We harvested the last salad from the garden, mostly what came up from the mesclun mix I planted at the end of August.  There was chervil and two kinds of green lettuce, some frisee and of course arugula, which is still growing. There were two small heads of radicchio, a red and a green that I left to see if they winter over.  I also cut some baby chard leaves and the yellow flowering stalks from the baby bok choy that were very sweet, not bitter at all.  When I cut some chard for Judy over the weekend I noticed that the slugs were still busy eating the ground leaves.  I hope on a morning like this they freeze solid.
2011-Most of the late season things in the garden were eaten by deer this season (see Oct. 22) but I did manage to make a Thanksgiving vegetable dish out of a mix of collards, kale, and wild mustard that was fantastic.  Every time it’s turned cold so far we get another reprieve of a couple of beautiful warm days.
I would have presumed that colors are brighter under the sun, but yesterday, under a deeply cloudy sky, the dried milkweed was bright rust against the scarlet rosehips. The greys behind them were rich and warm. Today under the sun, the milkweed is pure beige and the rosehips are lost in the tangle of their thorny branches.
2012-Early this month I wrote that the color had drained out of everything. But, as we are blinded when the lights go out, then gradually become accustomed to seeing by whatever available light, my eyes have become accustomed to this early winter palette. The relationships have changed, but from the high notes of the maroon rose stems to the underlying black greens of the junipers and the velvety charcoal apple trunks flecked with pale sage green lichen, the range is rich and varied once the vision clears. I wish I could paint it instead of talking about it.

November 21 - November 25 Bare Trees

2010-
The cobalt air balks
When the test results come back.
Red leaves dancing down.

2011-The fly is back-at least I think it’s him. Where does he go?
2012-On Nantucket this summer, the stars were brighter than I had ever seen which seemed natural away from bright lights. But this night the stars were shockingly bright here-like little shining lamps you could almost read by. Of course it was exceptionally clear but it seemed I had learned how to see stars better this summer and now have that new skill. It’s just the kind of learning how to see or where to look that I’ve been thinking about.

November 16 - November 20 Everything Turns Silver

2010- The ancient Chinese categorized this segment of the almanac as the time “pheasants enter the water and turn into monster clams”. It’s easy to laugh at these preposterous old fashioned ideas and explanations of the natural world, but what about the part of me that prefers these interpretations to the scientific one?  It is a cold and distant beauty that one observes in the world with just the strict senses and rational brain to go by.  I miss being personally involved; I need to have it be about me too and why not?  I am lonely for a world where such transformations are not only possible but part of the natural order.  Myths have gone missing or have been relegated to children who know, as we once knew, that these mythic explanations are in fact the more correct.
If pheasants enter the water and turn into monster clams, what transformations are possible for me?
2011-The little annoying fly that I asked not to bother me turns up every day around two o’clock. Then he fell in my wine glass and nearly drowned. I felt sorry for him then and put him on the counter to dry off. Later he flew near me but I haven’t seen him since. Do I miss him?
2012- A pair of bluebirds showed up, larking all over the deck and sipping rainwater from the slate table. At one point they both flew up and their feathers caught the sun and flashed out in that electric blue. I like to watch them with binoculars from not too far away; close enough to watch the breeze rippling their little brick colored under-feathers.
It seems that I am surrounded by magic but I’m simply looking the wrong way, or in the wrong direction.

November 11 - November 15 The Last Warm Spell

2010- A stretch of warmish days gives me just the time I need to finish painting the studio.  The crops, except for collards, kale and Brussels sprouts (which benefit from frost, becoming sweeter), are all in and processed.  (Oh, and except for the parsnips that stay in the ground all winter.)  Suddenly I will find myself with free time.  Before I can begin to write I know I will experience that period of restlessness and  ennui, the roaming from room to ruin and accomplishing of nothing that always precedes creative times. But with Thanksgiving coming and then leaving early for Florida, I wonder if I will be able to make that transition this year.
Every morning I listen for the weather report on the radio that tells the sunrise and sunset times, the length of the day and the loss in minutes of daylight from the day before. If I think of it in energy terms it is as if the meteorologist were reporting precisely the daily loss of yang. I almost experience a wave of nostalgia for a lost culture, one where I don’t feel so alien in terms of my sensibility and beliefs, one I never had of course but sense or imagine I sense in the culture of old Japan. In any case, it makes me wonder what it would be like to live in a time and place that resonates and truly feels like home.  Is that just not meant to be our (my)portion in this particular place?
2011-Am I surrounded by insect allies? The fruit fly that comes to sit at the top of the page just as I’m reading that animals and plants are smart? The spiders perhaps are not just busy making cobwebs but cheering me on from the corners, waving their multiple legs.  The fly in the kitchen that is so annoying but perhaps just wants to befriend me?  It is all I can do not to kill it, yet that’s something.

.A praying mantis
Pays a visit, nods hello;
Magic seeping in.

2012- I heard about some memory studies that show that what we remember is changed by the remembering. As some older people move towards spending more and more time recalling long ago events, perhaps they are reshaping the still malleable clay of their being into something more satisfyingly meaningful.  Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘what really happened’, but only what we make of it.
As for the mice, I can’t do the traps anymore. Not with that praying mantis staring at me. Seems there’s so many humane ways to go now, there’s just no excuse.

November 6-November 11 Hard Frost

2010- According to a Chinese almanac, it is officially winter. “…winter was not the season of death, as we might first suppose, but rather the season of dormancy and concealment.  So winter’s creatures are shell-covered…The dark turtle of the north is winter’s emblematic beast.”  I could claim that that is the prevailing ether driving me inside myself but honesty demands I admit that that personal psychic predilection came much before the season.  However it is good to feel, albeit briefly, in sync with the external world.  I also consider that the shortening of the day, the waning of the light is also the waning of the yang energy, the flowing in of yin.  This suits me to a T. 
Some wind and hard rain have made the bareness of the trees sudden.  This suits me as well.
2011-A spell of warm 60-70 degree days feels like a gift. Extra time to mow once again and collect cuttings for mulch, time to un-net the blueberries and prune them to make them easier to net next summer. The time change is affecting me differently this year. The morning feels correct now, getting light before seven, but the afternoons seem suddenly amputated. Though they had been feeling strangely long to me before. Hard to please! I am not feeling the hibernation urge yet either.
2012- After just a few nights of frost, color has drained out of any remaining leaves. Any bit of hue past grey or beige passes for bright and so it will be for many months to come. Days shrink to an even ten hours. Last night a fragment of waning moon shone through a light fog and a screen of bare branches like a night wanderer with only a feeble lantern.
Once again I find myself the Death Dealer. Many flies with the swatter yesterday- (Where are they coming from? What do they want? I tried to let them be but, finally, could not.) And a mouse in the trap this morning, beautiful really, neck crushed. I hate it but cannot bear the droppings everywhere, the smell when they get into the stove insulation, the pathetic infants crawling out of hidden nests when their mother fails to appear. (Those were not my fault, I had no traps set then. That one’s on you Mother Nature, but still...)

November 1-November 5 "like every other thing, a gift..."

(like every other thing, a gift...Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain)

2010-Real Indian summer follows a hard frost which we have not yet had.  But I will not argue with these last warm days.


Under a close November sky
The poetry of the apple
Red in the bare brown tree
Is sung by the eye
With the fire of orange Echinacea
Gone to purple ash.

A wind out of the twilit mountain
Pours intimations of snow
And bitter stinging
Over the still warm ground
Scattering the milkweed floss and
Rocking the apples on their stems.

Polarities chase each other onto tornadoes
Of mute foreboding
Leaving us no way to see ahead.
Is it fear makes the present
Seem so sweet
As apples embraced by frost?


2011-It turns out that it is still too early to put out the bird feeders.  I should have realized that it is not that cold and there is still plenty of food out there to be gathered--no self respecting creature would think of hibernating yet.  (The rose hips are especially plentiful this year.) I was awakened by the sound of the feeders hitting against the window as they will do when it is windy.  I watched as the new one broke free from its hook and dropped.  In retrospect it fell rather softly, but at the time I blamed myself for not securing the hook well and fell back to sleep, only to be awakened again. But this was not like wind and I realized something was out there scuffling around. Before I could think anything else I saw two huge black paws patting against the big window and then sliding down. A bear was standing on the cushion box and trying to get the other feeder down.  I jumped out of bed and banged on the window causing the bear to drop down and saunter off across the deck where it disappeared. It was a young bear but not small and the way it calmly walked away could be considered almost insolent.  At the same time, its silent silky ways were like night incarnate.  I am left with the shamanic image of a bear standing over me, paws raised.
Color worth noting; the maroon, green and yellow of the forsythia when a cardinal comes to pose there. Clashing and aggressive-wonderful.
A flock of mixed finches is going crazy scarfing down ash keys all over the deck even though they fell months ago.
2012-  A neon colony on the picnic bench, a lone inky cap appearing overnight in the middle of the lawn; there were few chanterelles this year but these recent mysterious visitations of the fungi people are intriguing. What have they come to say?

October 27-October 31 Leaves Turn Brown

                                                    storm over Seaside Park, NJ 2009

2010-The brightest yellow was the star magnolia which slowly shaded from acid yellow green to pure golden yellow so bright it hurt your eyes.  Then it gradually darkened to real gold and then mustard and then ochre. Today it is so butterscotch brown it makes my mouth water.
The trees on the hills all around have lost their brightness and turned a hundred shades of browns. It always amazes me how that one palette can seem as varied as the full spectrum when spread out before our eyes. Brown red and brown yellow now seem as separate and distinct as their primary cousins.
Yesterday, taking advantage of the warm to put away the grill and hammock and summer furniture, I came across a lone dandelion in the grass.  We don’t think of later fall as a time for flowers to bloom but, like the errant dandelion, some do.  The most spectacular and surprising is the forsythia which has more flowers now than in some poor springs and against dark burgundy leaves.  My pink climbing rose didn’t re-bloom this year but many around here have.  (I remember the roses in the churchyard in Aberdeen blooming into December.  So poignant and utterly different from their June counterparts.)

Dandelion blooms
Yellow against frost-sere grass.
They do not fool me.

2011-An unprecedented nor’easter appears out of nowhere, roars up the coast and deposits about ten to twelve inches of snow.  The leaves having not completely fallen, wet snow sticks to them and many branches come down; again leading to power outages (over a million all up the coast.) This is more than inconvenient this time as with temperatures dropping into the twenties, water lines freezing is a real possibility. We are lucky and power is on in less than twenty four hours though they say Connecticut and the Berkshires will take much longer. Bright green grass appears between the white patches, oddly littered with brown and yellow leaves.  The grill and the lawn furniture are under a layer of snow-I’d thought I had more time.  The dahlia is completely frost-blackened; time to bring the tubers inside.
I did buy seeds for the bird feeders, but though the bag was labeled black oil sunflower, it contained regular large sunflower seeds. They are mostly too big to fit through the little openings in my squirrel proof feeders and the birds must think I am playing a mean Halloween trick on them.  They are not amused.
2012-Sunday night into late Monday night, a fair amount of wind and intermittent spits of rain. The power goes out, but that’s fairly common here. A tree is down across our road, but generally the roads are clear. Schools close for a day, the power returns. Without media input, that would have been our total experience of  this particular late October storm.
But this storm was Super-storm Sandy. Gathered at houses with generators, over the airwaves of battery radios, and later when power returns, we hear and see an unending stream of images and reporting of the most devastating storm to ever hit the Northeast. We share each other‘s experiences now; ours is shaped and colored by what we consume through our devices. What we have invented has turned around to re-invent us and nothing is the same.