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| October. |
We’ve arrived at October, the month when the growing world goes out with a flash of color and a nip of frost. Autumn is a season of nostalgia and introspection for me. Watching the world settle into its winter sleep stirs deep feelings. Memories from childhood and youth well up, triggered by sights, sounds, and smells – colored leaves on the hills, the calling of geese flying in the dark, a whiff of smoke in the air, the fragrance of fallen apples. All around me I see evidence that spring’s vitality and summer’s lush splendor are gone. Autumn reminds me that all things come to an end, that “our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The fragile prettiness of the season heightens the emotion. It is intense and brief and beautiful.
I associate autumn and particularly October with poetry. I have always loved poetry, from my first introduction to it in the nursery rhymes my mother read to me to the sonnets of Shakespeare that I discovered and devoured later in life. I owe my love of poetry mostly to three women. The first was my mother, Mary Dolores Rathfon Howe, who read to me at bedtime from a book I still cherish. From her I learned to appreciate the rhythm and rhyme of poems that I can still recite perfectly more that sixty years later – Humpty Dumpty, Little Bo Peep, Hickory Dickory Dock, and so many others. The next woman was my fourth grade teacher, Miss Charlotte Conley (1912-2011), who read poems to us and had us memorize and recite poems to her. She especially loved Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Robert Louis Stevenson and passed that love on to me. I still know parts of The Song of Hiawatha and poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses that she taught me. The last woman was my grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Showers Rathfon (1906-1987). She loved poetry and was a gifted poet. She shared her poems and her love of poetry with me. Her 115th birthday is this Thursday, October 7th. From the age of 15 to around the time I married at 26 I wrote poems. I liked the discipline of forcing my thoughts and feelings into patterns of rhythm and rhyme. I don’t know why I stopped. I still read poetry when the mood strikes me, which is mostly in the fall of the year. I prefer the more traditional and structured kind. Here are two of the many autumn poems I love.
Emily Dickinson: As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy —
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon —
The Morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone —
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
Robert Frost: October
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
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| From top to bottom: My nursery rhyme book, a poem in A Child's Garden of Verses I can still recite, Hiawatha I still remember "By the shores of Gitche Gumee." |
All last week I found myself singing or humming a little song I learned when I was in Japan called Akatombo, Red Dragonfly. It is a simple tune with melancholy words that, to the Japanese, is the essence of autumn. It describes a boy’s feelings of nostalgia and his longing for home and his family. It is a lovely song. The English translation doesn’t adequately express the tenderness of the Japanese words.
Owarete mitano wa itsu no hi ka When was it that I watched them from my mother’s back?
Yama no hatake no kuwano mi o In mountain fields we gathered mulberries
Kokago ni tsunda wa maboroshi ka in small baskets. Or was it just a dream?
Jugo de neya wa yome ni yuki At fifteen my big sister left home to get married.
Osato no tayori mo taehateta Her letters have long since ceased to come.
Yuyake koyake no akatombo Red dragonflies in the sunset
Tomatte ir yo sao no saki on the tip of a bamboo pole.
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| Raspberries looking a bit ragged, but still loaded with fruit. |
I took a look through old photos last week to see what the first of October was like in past years. It seemed to me that this year the leaves were changing slowly. I was right, most years we are further along than this. But now there is some color showing on the hills at last.
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| The first of October over the years. |
Wednesday morning when I left for school it was 33°, just one degree above freezing. I didn’t have time then to go out and inspect the garden to see if it might have been cold enough during the night to freeze things, but when I got in the car, there was frost on the windshield. Later in the afternoon when I got home from school, I did my inspection and didn’t see any sign of frost damage on even the most sensitive plants. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Stacey’s employer, Mr. Rigas, had been in the hospital off and on in failing health. Stacey had spent a lot of time with him there last week. Thursday, they were planning to bring Mr. Rigas home for hospice care. But before she left for work that morning, she was notified that Mr. Rigas had passed away earlier that morning. He never made it home. He was 96 years old. We’d known for some time that his health was deteriorating rapidly, so his death wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a sad thing. Stacey has been taking care of him for almost six years and was completely devoted to him. Mr. Rigas was a remarkable man. He was the son of Greek immigrants who came to the United States in the 1920's. They settled in Wellsville, New York, where Mr. Rigas was born in 1924. He fought in World War II in the 20th Army Division in France and in Germany, where he was at the liberation of Dachau. Later, he married his wife Doris and began a family. Mr. Rigas began his career by buying the Coudersport Theater in 1950. From there, he went on to build a cable empire, Adelphia Communications. For a long time Adelphia was the biggest employer in this area and Mr. Rigas was an adored member of the community. Then in 2002 Adelphia was involved in financial troubles and was dismantled and in 2008 Mr. Rigas, then 83, and one of his sons were sent to prison. After eight years in prison at the age of 92, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and was released to come home with, they thought, three months to live. Stacey, who had taken care of Mrs. Rigas until her death in 2014 and then had continued working for the family, took over caring for Mr. Rigas. She quickly came to admire him as a generous, funny, and very intelligent man. Mr. Rigas underwent treatment for his cancer and lived six years longer than expected. They were good years. Then his health began to fail again and, with the frailty of his 96 year old body, he knew and we knew his time was coming. All of our family during those years came to love and admire him. He will be missed, but we know that he is happy, that his pain is gone, and he is reunited with his loved ones. His passing truly marks the end of an era for this community and for our family.
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| Mr. Rigas in his Army uniform age 93. |
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| With Mr. Rigas at the Christmas Concert 2018. |
I wasn’t in school on Thursday. It was cool and cloudy most of the day. I worked indoors all morning making applesauce. We’re at the point where we have to keep working on the apples steadily to keep them from going to waste. That afternoon I drove to Genesee for a haircut. The sun was breaking through the clouds by then. As I drove, I noticed fields lined with the last cutting of drying hay waiting to be baled. On the hills there were more splashes of red and orange among the green. The field corn is starting to brown and there were flocks of birds swirling over them. The seasons are shifting and life has changed. That afternoon, on the last day of September, we lit the furnace, which always feels like a sort of capitulation, a surrender to the fall and what lies beyond it.
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| On the back roads between Genesee and Gold. |
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| On the back roads between Genesee and Gold. |
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| On the back roads between Genesee and Gold. |
Friday morning when I checked the thermometer, it read 32°. It was still dark and I couldn’t see from my window if there was frost. By the time I left for school, it had lightened and I went out to do a quick check. Near the house, everything was good, but out in the more exposed areas of the big garden, there was some frost damage. But my gardens are still safe, so far, and I’m hoping those morning glories will open at least one flower before their demise.
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| My morning glory - buds, but no blossoms yet. |
This is General Conference weekend and we watched all three sessions yesterday. There were excellent and timely talks given. In between the first and second sessions (our sessions are at noon, 4:00, and 8:00) I had to go outside. It was a perfect fall day. It was actually warm enough, 75°, to be a perfect summer day except for the fall colors. This is the nicest October garden I’ve ever had and I had to take a long stroll to enjoy it all.
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| My October flowerbeds. |
I woke this morning to the sound of rain drumming on the front porch roof, a nice sound, but it meant an end to our bright blue weather. We’re taking it easy all day today. It is the Sabbath, the day of rest, and it is General Conference, so we don’t have to go anywhere. That’s perfect. The week ahead, at least the next three days, looks to be not so nice with rain every day. By the time the rain ends I’ll be anxious to get back to work on all the projects I need to finish before things freeze. Good Sabbath.
