Moving Into November

It's November now. The year is rushing to its close. We've switched the clocks to standard time and that makes the dark days seem even darker. Sunset comes so early now, around 5:00 p.m. and sunrise, although seeming to be earlier, will creep along later and later as we approach the winter solstice. November is a stark month. All the color seems to fade out of the world. The lawns go brown. The bright leaves have fallen. No garden flower or wild flower blooms in November. Nature's pallet is all browns and tans and grays. One of the few things I love about this month is seeing the trees with their newly revealed bare branches lit by the long light of the dwindling sun. A severe sort of beauty.

Bare branched maples in the front yar.

Empty apple trees in the orchard.

October's finale was lovely, a parting gift of warm spring-like weather. Tuesday, our first day back after our trip out west, was a quiet day as life returned to "normal." I unpacked. I did laundry. I had a doctor's appointment -- something that, unfortunately, has become more normal these days. Later in the morning, I planted spring bulbs.

The bulbs I ordered this year were late in arriving. When I plant fall bulbs, I like to have them in the ground by mid October to give them time to settle in before the ground freezes. I think these bulbs will be okay. With the weather as mild as it's been, I don't foresee the ground freezing any time soon. I planted fifty tulips, fifty daffodils, fifteen hyacinths, and one oriental poppy. The tulips are almost an act of folly. Every time I plant them, I swear it will be the last time I waste money on them. They are a favorite food of every mammalian pest we have here. Deer, rabbits, and voles all love them. But I'm a sucker for tulips. When the fall bulb catalogs arrive and I see those dazzling pictures, I can't resist trying one more time. This time, I planted them in the flowerbed at the head of the driveway. I've never had a vole problem there and I think the proximity of it to the parked cars and the house will deter the rabbits and deer. We'll see. Daffodils aren't a problem. Nothing likes to eat them. Planting bulbs in the last days of my gardening year is an act of faith and hope. Faith that the earth will continue in its cycle of seasons and, after a winter's sleep, that spring will come again. And hope that these bulbs will survive and I'll see them in bloom in about six months.

The bed where I planted the bulbs.

Wednesday was about as nice as a day in late October can get. The dawn was cool and misty, but when the sun came up, everything changed. By 11:00 it was 75 degrees. It was sunny and breezy. It was beautiful. I spent the whole day outdoors reveling in it. I mowed leaves. I trimmed around the fruit trees. I pulled a few weeds here and there. And for half an hour I just sat in the sunshine and watched the world. I chose a vantage point where I could see most of the yard. I saw birds at the feeders and jays taking hazel nuts from the hedge. Although I couldn't see the beaver pond, I saw ducks and geese flying in for their splash landings. I watched huge billowing clouds sail across the sky. I heard the thud of a few of the last apples lingering high up in the King of Tompkins tree as the breeze knocked them loose and they fell. It was a day to delight all the senses.

Sunset on Wednesday.

I began compiling my Winter Reading List last week, lining up titles to entertain and educate me over the next long months. I began it with two books I've read several times before, but they seemed like a fun way to begin the list and I immediately launched into them. When I was fifteen years old, I read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. I already knew about them in a vague way because I'd seen the Disney cartoon version, on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color sometime in the 60s, but reading the books for the first time, I was amazed. I immediately fell in love with them. My infatuation was also strengthened because the copies I read had the classic illustrations by John Tenniel. I loved those books so much that I memorized two of the poems in Through the Looking Glass -- Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. I've read both books many times since then, but not in the last twenty years or so. Last week, while starting on my list, I spotted my copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and, in a fit of nostalgia, I took it down and read it again. Then I had to go on and read Through the Looking Glass too. They were as quirky and charming as I remembered. Before I began this reading of Through the Looking Glass, I tested my memory by attempting to recite Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. Jabberwocky was easy. It's a short poem of only seven stanzas and somehow the nonsensical words like "brillig" and "galumphing" make it easier to remember. The Walrus and the Carpenter is another matter. It has eighteen stanzas and there are no nonsense words, although the poem itself is pretty nonsensical. I amazed myself by reciting it almost perfectly. Not bad for fifty-one years later.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

Jabberwocky.

The Walrus and the Carpenter.

Thursday was another beautiful warm and windy day. The wind couldn't decide which direction to blow from. One minute it was from the west, the next it was from the north, battling back and forth. It sent leaves skittering every direction, sometimes in eddies that lifted them high in the air. As part of my winter preparations, I spent most of the day cleaning the upper part of the barn. It was a filthy job. I first swept out a summer's worth of cobwebs. The barn spiders were all dead, sleeping, or gone wherever they go at summer's end. Only their dirty webs remained. I used a broom to gather them from the rafters where they hung down in dingy gray sheets. The barn has a lot of ventilation to keep it dry and airy. But that also means that dust from the road gets in. You might think that dust from a dirt road twenty feet away wouldn't be so bad, but it is. It comes through the vents under the eaves and settles into every nook and cranny. It clings to the cobwebs and accumulates in a layer an inch thick on the floor and every flat surface. After getting rid of the webs, my main task was sweeping all that dust up. The barn has eight bays between the roof joists. I took them one at a time. When I finished sweeping, I'd gathered a five gallon bucket almost full to the top with dust. I had my nose and mouth covered as I swept, but I still managed to breathe in a lot of dust. After a bit of sneezing and nose blowing, I managed to get it all out. I was glad to be done with that job for another year.

Panoramic view of the upper barn, newly cleaned.

As October drew to its close, we kept our usual Halloween traditions. Miriam and Hannah spent the evenings on Monday and Tuesday carving jack-o'-lanterns. They set up their carving station in the workroom upstairs, armed with an assortment of knives and spoons and bowls to hold the scooped out pumpkin guts (I fed the guts to the pigs and they loved them). It was quite an operation. We watched some of our traditional Halloween movies while they carved. The results were amazing. They carved eleven pumpkins with a variety of faces, some new and original, some more traditional. We put them on the front porch stairs and there they sat, glowing on Halloween night. We didn't do anything else special for Halloween. We never get trick-or-treaters. Miriam and Hannah had a choir practice and were gone all evening. Stacey was working on the computer downstairs. So I sat upstairs and watched a few episodes of The Twilight Zone. That's all.

Jack-o'-lanterns by day.

Jack-o'-lanterns by night.

November arrived on Friday with a chill. October's warm and breezy last hurrah vanished right at midnight when the north wind finally won the battle. The sound of it pelting rain against the front of the house woke me up. All Saints Day dawned gray and rainy. It wasn't freezing, just cold enough to portend the approach of winter. The sun came out later in the morning, but a chilly wind blew steadily from the northwest all day. I spent most of the day running errands. I drove up to Wellsville to buy chicken feed and then to Ulysses to buy hog feed. On my way in between, I stopped to visit my friends Bob and Nancy Jones. Bob is recovering from an accidental fall. When I got home, I unloaded all the feed. I always miss having younger, stronger sons around when I'm unloading feed. Later, when Miriam got home from school, we drove out to the Amish bulk food store to stock up on some things.

Sarah and Tosh arrived Friday in the late afternoon with the last of their possessions. A group of us gathered at their new house to help them unload their piano and other items. After unloading, we came home and had our traditional Hannah's Homemade Friday Night Pizza.

I continued my work in the barn on Saturday, this time in the lower part, the chicken coop. That was also a dirty job. There were just as many cobwebs there as in the upper part and I swept them away. I took down a bucket of soapy water and cleaned all the windows. I raked up debris, old straw and feathers from the floor. The chickens were, as always, curious about what I was doing. Some of the friendlier ones got underfoot. I brought their waterers up to the house and scrubbed them. I set up the electric heaters for the waterers before I put them back. I won't plug them in until I have to. At this point, I'm still using the rain barrel for their water and hope to continue doing that well into December. Now all I need to do is put down fresh straw and the coop will be ready for winter.

What a barn window looks like before cleaning.

After cleaning.

I threw the jack-o'-lanterns to the pigs as their Saturday midday meal (I say midday meal, but they pretty much eat continuously all day and even during the night). They played with them at first, tossing them around, and then set to eating them.

Jack-o'-lantern carnage in the pigpen.

In the afternoon, Stacey, Miriam, and I went over to the Foster's to help with unpacking. I worked on organizing the kitchen and loading books on their bookshelves. Miriam and Stacey worked on other rooms. We accomplished a lot, but there's a lot more still to do.

One of my favorite floral events it happening now. Every year, just after the outdoor flowers are gone and the garden is bare, my Thanksgiving Cacti (Schlumbergera truncata) bloom. Mine are always early, blooming around Halloween. I have two of them, a pale pink one, and bright red one. I also have a Christmas Cactus (Schlumberera bridgesii) that will bloom later on in December, and an Easter Cactus (Rhipsalidopsis gaertneri) that blooms in the spring. They live in the west window of my bedroom. Seeing them in flower makes me happy.

My pink Thanksgiving cactus.

My red Thanksgiving cactus.

It was cold this morning, 18 degrees. Our first morning in the teens since March. There was a heavy frost. With the clocks set back an hour, you'd think I could get an extra hour of sleep, but no. This morning my body clock woke me up at the old 5:30 which is now 4:30, and I couldn't fall back to sleep. It will take me a week or more to adjust. Earlier in the week I sent out an email reminder to the members of the branch and I was curious to see who would show up early for church, but everyone remembered. There were only 22 people at church, but unfortunately, that's about average these days. I don't know what to do to encourage people to come to church. I joke and tell people that our little branch is a geriatric branch, but it is too true. Our congregation is mostly older people. Hannah and Miriam are the youngest members. And many of our members have health problems that prevent them from attending regularly. But our services were good and those who were there were edified, I think.

Now we are home. We've broken our fast. I've done the chores. The Fosters are here to spend the day with us. I hear instruments in the other room. It sounds like we're about to make some music. And then off we go, full steam ahead into November.