It seems fitting to celebrate the transition from summer to fall, missing the freedoms of the former, looking with a mix of dread and anticipation at what lies ahead. Here are three journal-records of the season, selected from Slow Road Home: a blue ridge book of days.
Changing of the Guard
Just when we humans are starting to wind down our daylight busy-ness and go inside for the night, thinking how good it’s going to feel on these cooler nights to pull the covers up to our chins, there are other creatures that make good use of the nocturnal side of the human day—lives lived while we dream.
First as shadows lengthen late in the day come the birds that feed overhead. Chimney swifts and nighthawks sweep the air with wide open mouths, scooping up invisible insects that rise like a cloud in the billowing thermals. Later will come the mammals that harvest the same in-flight feeding niche—the bats that we see mostly as shadows against the sky, black against deep indigo, erratically finding beetles and midges and moths by sonar. And last night, just before we reached the barn coming home from our walk at quarter ‘til dark, a screech owl trilled from the edge of the woods. Deer snorted and huffed indignantly as if to tell us we were infringing on their shifts, that we should go indoors, and give them their due share of solitude and sky.
With the shorter days, the nights are beginning to chill and there will soon be no insects at dusk, and those that feed on them will move on to find other work to the south. The deer will hide from hunters back in the steepest woods; and the owls will own the crepuscular hours until spring comes.
Falling
There is a certain exciting melancholy in the coming of the first fall-like days—a letting go and a welcome all together. I sit here in the cool shade with my feet stretched out into the slanting sun’s warmth and comfort and watch yellow leaves of walnut and locust flutter and sift toward the spent soil of summer. The last of the tiger swallowtails lift and spiral as if to put those yellows back in place for just a few more days.
The forest is still green from a distance, but a closer inspection will show you that no leaf is untouched by changes that shorter days have brought. Their surfaces are lightly filigreed by insects that could not have made a meal of them in the healthy prime of summer. Striped maples show patches of discolored spots, red and yellow circles like ringworm, where fungal threads wind their way through the spongy spaces between upper and lower surface of the leaf.
Soon the fungi and bacteria will consume blade and petiole. Like a thrift store shirt, a leaf’s matter will pass on and on, handed down until there is nothing left but buttons and a few bare threads.
Aural Vignette
“Come” I said, motioning for Ann in the kitchen to follow. The two of us stood on the front porch in the darkness, listening.
Morning on Goose Creek in the October of our lives sounds like this: drops falling from dew-wet branches; bush crickets whirring, one from a goldenrod along the pasture whose song blends with the next, higher up in the meadow, and a dozen more in monotone requiem to summer past; and beneath all other sounds, and around them, the rift of water over rock, falling into the hollow of itself, a spattering, tinkling liquid philharmonic of peace.
If there were no humans on earth, this is what the world would sound like. And there are two, standing utterly still, and thankful.
By Fred First [email protected]