Into November

My November Guest
by Robert Frost (1874 –1963)

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
     She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
     Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
     The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
     And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.

I learned long ago that Robert Frost and I are kindred spirits. I love his poems. I understand the feeling he describes in this poem. The same sort of feeling comes over me at times. I think of it as the Saturday Feeling because it comes most often on a Saturday towards evening. I wouldn’t call it melancholy, but it might be its cousin. It’s hard to describe. It’s a comfortable sort of sadness that happens when the day is winding down, when I’ve retired from my labors and no more work will be done. Then all the things I did or did not accomplish during the week seem to rise up in praise or accusation. The world and I are another week older and what have we done? And what still lies ahead to be done? It comes upon me more often in the fall than other seasons. November is a Saturday Feeling sort of month. When the Saturday Feeling comes, the world seems old. It looks old. Even the sunlight has an ancient sort of chilly yellowness to it, like the world is stuck in amber, slowing down, fossilizing. And then Sunday comes and we rest and renew ourselves and start all over again with new and endless possibilities.

November.

November is a bedraggled sort of month. The glory of October is gone and, with the memory of its colors still fresh in my mind, November’s pallet of browns and grays seems drab. The trees and the garden are sleeping. A deeper cold starts to settle in. My world shrinks to indoor spaces. It is a smoky month spent hovering near the wood stove and by the furnace grate. It is a time for wool and flannel. And yet, there is a spark of hope ahead. At the end of the month the year’s climactic holiday season will begin. Soon there will be feasts and family to warm me. But until then, November just drags along, shivering.

On Monday morning, I made one more batch of jelly from the last of the raspberries. As I was screwing the ring onto the last jar to put into the canner, my grip slipped and I dropped it and splashed hot liquid jelly over almost every surface in the kitchen. It was miserable cleaning it up, but I was more sorry for the loss of the jelly than the misery of the task. While I was cleaning, I heard a snap over by the refrigerator and when I went to look, I found a mouse in the trap we set there. It was a pretty little white-footed deer mouse (Peromyscus leucopus).When the cold days come, the deer mice try to come in from the fields to spend the winter with us indoors. Like Robert Burns, I felt bad for the wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie. Its best-laid scheme to live with us had definitely gang agley, but it should have stayed outdoors.

The end of October was wet and chilly. Our Halloween on Tuesday was quiet. Miriam spent the day making Día de los Muertos cookies for our friend Kerry Dunn’s Spanish classes at Coudersport High School. In the evening, Miriam and Hannah went to a volleyball game down in St. Marys and didn’t get home until late. Stacey was busy downstairs all evening finishing up making cookies. No trick-or-treaters came to our door. They never do, and that’s okay. So I sat upstairs and watched episodes of The Twilight Zone. When I was young, my father did not let us watch that show and so it has always intrigued me. As soon as I could, without my father knowing, I watched every episode. I still can watch it over and over again. I think it is one of the best TV shows ever made – a blend of Edgar Allan Poe and Classic Science Fiction with an undercurrent of Cold War angst.

Miriam's Día de los Muertos cookies.

Wednesday morning, the first of November, we awoke to find a light dusting of snow settled on the cold places – the cars, the tall grass, the garden bench, the greenhouse roof. There were flurries off and on all that day, but they never amounted to anything.

November sunrise.

Harvesting continued last week, but now it’s all indoor work. There is nothing left to bring in from the garden. With all our crops gathered in, we pressed on with processing them for storage. We have the freeze-dryer running constantly. The queue of things in the freezer waiting to be processed is long – tomato sauce, apple sauce, apple slices, pumpkin puree, onions, carrots, potatoes, garlic, corn, and broccoli. I’m thankful for the bounty and will be even more thankful when it’s all done and put away. 

Back at the end of September, in anticipation of a frost, we pulled up all the bean plants and hung them to dry in the front room in the house next door. I wasn’t sure if the pods were mature enough to get any usable beans, but they turned out fine. On Wednesday we threshed them to get the beans out of the pods. We pulled the pods off the dry vines and piled them on sheets. Then we folded up the sheets and tromped on them to shatter the pods. After that, we sifted out the pod fragments as best we could and bagged the beans. Then on Thursday morning, I set up a fan outdoors and winnowed the beans, something I’d never done before. It was a messy business the whole way along – lots of dust and leaves and bits of bean pods everywhere. We ended up with six pounds of red beans and twelve pounds of black beans. It wouldn’t seem worth all the time and effort when we can just buy a twenty pound sack of beans for $20, but it was educational and at least we know we can grow them successfully and that they are organic.

Beans waiting to be threshed.

My winnowing setup.

The final product - black beans.

The final product - red beans.

I have a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) that I planted in the front yard twenty years ago. It has never been very happy here. We are on the colder edge of its preferred growing zone. Tulip trees like to grow in Zones 4 - 9 and we are more like the warmer edge of Zone 3. It has grown slowly over the years and has never bloomed, but it is a pretty tree even so. Every year it holds its leaves late until a hard freeze comes when they go from green to brown and fall off. But this year, for the first time, its leaves turned a beautiful shade of yellow, the way that happier tulip trees are supposed to do. It is the last tree in my yard to have leaves and they are going fast. The larch trees on the hill above Gold have gone golden. They are the last of the forest trees to change. I waited all week for that moment when the sun shines and makes them glow, but it never came.

My tulip tree.

On Thursday, after the temperature had risen above freezing, I went out for one last round of mowing. There were leaves on the lawn at our house and at Shillig’s. I can’t stand to have leaves on the lawn over winter. So I mowed them up one last time. Really. This was the last time. When I finished, I didn’t put the mower under the pavilion where it stays during the growing season, I parked it in the barn next door. It will be there until spring.

The brightest color in the garden, one last blueberry bush.

The brightest color in the house, my Christmas cactus.

On Thursday evening we had our missionaries over for dinner. This was a special dinner. One of our missionaries, Elder Gyman, has finished his mission and is returning home next week. A few weeks ago when he was at our house, he saw our menorah and the seder plate we have on our bookshelf and he told us that his father is a Jewish convert to the church. We asked if his family ever did anything to celebrate their Jewish heritage and he said no. So on Thursday we treated the missionaries to a combination Passover/Hanukkah dinner. We had apricot chicken, potato latkes, haroset, matzah, hard-boiled eggs, macaroons, pound cake, and homemade grape juice. We gave them a brief synopsis of what a Passover seder is and what Hanukkah is about and how Christ and His gospel fits into it all. After dinner, we played dreidel. It was a fun evening.

Dinner with the missionaries.

Friday morning it was clear and cold. It was 22° when I went out for my morning walk. There was a heavy frost and, for the first time there was ice on part of the beaver pond and our lily pond was covered in ice. The sunrise was very pretty. It was a bright sunny day and as soon as the frost was gone, I went out to do some winter preparations. I ran an electric line down to the barn so I can plug in the chickens’ water heaters when I have to. I ran an electric line to the Christmas lights on the driveway fence. I don’t need to use either of those lines yet, but it’s good to take advantage of a sunny day to get the job done before I have to do it. I trimmed my gladiolus and put them in storage. Then I dug up my dahlias, washed their roots and set them in the sun to dry. They were not dry enough to store, so I covered them for the night.

Sunrise on Friday.

Sunrise on Friday.

Ice on the lily pond.

Friday evening we went to the temple. We got there at six o’clock. We don’t usually go at night because the long drive home in the dark is like driving a deer obstacle course. But we went and had a great time and missed every deer that bolted out in front of us.

At the temple.

At the temple.

Saturday was a busy day. Stacey and I ran errands up in Wellsville in the morning – cleaning the chapel, buying chicken feed and other necessary items, filling up the car. When we got home, I had a goal to finish up any remaining garden jobs. I only had a few. The dahlias were dry, so I bagged them in burlap sacks full of pine shavings and put them down cellar for the winter. I wrapped my new fruit trees – three peach and one cherry, and my little persimmon tree – in burlap and put a collar of hardware cloth around their trunks to fend off the rabbits and voles that like to chew on fruit tree bark during the starving times. I raked up a pile of leaves and spread them in my raised beds to rot over winter. At the end of the day, as a light rain began to fall, I took a walk around and looked for anything else I needed to do. I couldn’t find anything other than some weeds in the long border. There are always weeds, but I’m done with them until spring now. The weeds are safe until March. Looking around in the fading light, I felt a combination of satisfaction and sadness – satisfaction that we had a good garden year (despite not having any apples on our trees) and sadness that it’s all over now and there isn’t anything more to do – that old Saturday Feeling again.

Digging up dahlias.

Dahlia tubers dry and ready for storage.

And today is Sunday, a day to rest from my labors, or at least to switch my labors from the weekday things to the Sabbath things. It’s a different kind of work. We had our monthly Branch Council meeting this morning. We are already discussing and making plans for the branch Christmas dinner, our Christmas Eve service, and other year end things. It seems too soon, but it isn’t. Today is Fast Sunday and our Testimony meeting was good. We had a great Sunday School lesson on the first six chapters of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Now we’re home and I’m hungry. I don’t know what we’re having for lunch but there better be plenty of it. In looking at the week ahead, I see rain is likely for the latter half of the week. I don’t have to fret about the weather so much now, at least not until the snow comes. We set the clocks to standard time so my body clock feels off kilter as it will for a week until I adjust. The chickens don’t care about changing the clocks. They are already standing at the back fence waiting for me. I guess I’ll do the chores early to make them happy. After lunch I plan to take my first November Sabbath nap. It’s a good month for napping. Good Sabbath!