October's Bright Blue Weather
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
Yes, here we are, it’s October already. Based on her poem, I think Helen Hunt Jackson lived in a milder climate than I do. Even so, this can be one of the most beautiful or one of the most disappointing months of the year here in Potter County. If we have some of that bright blue weather, it is glorious. But some years it is a cold and gloomy month when the leaves go dull and drop without much color. And often, too often, we get our first snow in October. So far the fall leaves have not been very colorful. We are seeing a few bright splashes here and there on the hills, but not the sort of spectacle we’ve seen in past years. The maples in my front yard are sometimes glorious. This year they are quickly dropping rather dull leaves.
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| October in years past. |
I think most people regard fall as a visual season. The changing of the leaves is (usually) a spectacular sight and the dominant feature. But for me, the aromas of autumn are almost as important and most of them are related to those same leaves. To go out on an autumn morning and smell damp leaves, or the smell of dry leaves raked into a pile, or the scent of smoke from burning those dry leaves is quintessential autumn. There are other smells too, like the first whiff of smoke from the wood stove on a chilly night and that undefinable smell of coldness on a fall morning when there is frost, a smell that is almost as much a feeling as it is an odor.
I noticed in writing that paragraph, that I switch between using fall and autumn without really thinking about why I use one or the other. Because I have an obsession with words, I had to find out why we have two words for the same season. In every other language I’m familiar with, there is just one word – aki in Japanese, Herbst in German, autunno in Italian, otoño in Spanish. In English the other seasons are singular – winter is just winter, summer is just summer, spring is just spring, but fall can also be autumn. It turns out that originally the English called the season harvest until the 1300s when autumn began to displace it. The etymologists aren’t really sure where the word autumn originated. They trace it back to the Old French autumpne then further back to Latin auctumnus and maybe from there to a lost Etruscan word. Calling the season fall became popular in the 1600s when the phrase “the fall of the leaves” was shortened to just fall. The English began to settle in the New World in the 1600s when fall was the popular word, which is why Americans mostly refer to the season as fall and the British prefer autumn. But we do use both words. I think I base my usage on what sounds best in the sentence I’m writing.
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| The kanji aki, autumn. |
Most of the week seems a blur to me now, a mish-mash of rain, making applesauce, Perry Mason, and cheese omelets. I was looking forward with high anticipation to the return of my family from their Florida adventure on Wednesday, but it didn’t happen. Hurricane Ian arrived. And although he moved up the west side of Florida and then north and my family was on the east side and south, their flights were canceled and they had to stay two extra days. That meant more episodes of Perry Mason for me, but Kurt and Julie rescued me from one more cheese omelet by inviting me to dinner on Wednesday evening. At least the rain had stopped by Thursday. After school I mowed the lawn. For the next weeks I will be mowing up leaves as much as grass. Those shredded leaves are a valuable component in my compost. But I’ll be happy when I can put the mower away for the winter.
My family finally got a flight out of Florida on Thursday afternoon. They flew from Miami to Chicago to Buffalo and arrived home in the wee hours of Friday morning. I was so happy to hear them come in the door. Later on Friday I got to hear all about their adventure. They were in Key West on Sunday and went to church there. They liked the chickens that have established a semi-wild population there. The rest of the time they spent around Vero Beach treasure hunting. Miriam and Roxann both had metal detectors that they used to comb the beach. They didn’t find anything, but had fun looking. They saw iguanas, sea turtles, tarpon, and needlefish. And they got to experience a hurricane, sort of. Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida on Wednesday. Where they were, they did not feel the brunt of the storm. They saw torrential rain, and were in the vicinity of some tornadoes, but that was it. They enjoyed the warmth, which made their homecoming a bit cruel.
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| Adventurers in Florida. |
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| Beach combing. |
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| At the southernmost point of the USA at Key West. |
Friday morning, the last day of September, we had heavy frost. It was 24° when I got up that morning. When I went down to let the chickens out, the lawn was silvered with frost. The beaver pond across from the barn was shrouded in low fog. After feeding the chickens, I took a walk through the gardens. The frost was beautiful, but destructive. The flowers looked lovely decked in frosty lace, but once the day warmed, they turned to brown, droopy mush. The frost brought an end to the tender plants – zinnias, dahlias, marigolds, nasturtiums, cosmos, impatiens – are done now. The morning glory is gone, having never bloomed. Now I will clear it all away and tuck the flowerbeds in for their long winter sleep. Frost is an elegant, pretty, and yet brutal way to kill a garden.
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| Friday morning frost. |
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| Frosty beaver pond. |
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| Frosted zinnia. |
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| Frosted dahlia. |
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| Frosted sunflower with a frozen honeybee. |
Sunset on Friday was spectacular. The sky suddenly went orange and I walked to the edge of the neighbor’s sheep pasture to watch it. After a few minutes, I turned to go back to the house. By the time I reached the back porch stairs, the orange had turned to vivid red. Then in a moment, it faded to gray. It seemed a fitting farewell to September.
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| Sunset over the sheep pasture. |
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| Sunset at the end of September. |
This weekend is General Conference. We watched the three sessions yesterday and will watch two today. The messages we’ve heard have been and will be uplifting and timely. It’s refreshing to hear words of kindness and encouragement in our tumultuous world but also words of warning and admonition. I always feel a sense of clarity and a desire to do and be better after watching General Conference.
While I was alone for most of the week, I became more familiar with the mouse that lives (lived) in the upstairs workroom. Every evening while I worked on painting signs and watched Perry Mason, the little mouse would come out from behind one of the shelves that hold binders and photo albums and climb down the shelves and scurry across the floor into a gap in the wall and then back again. Yesterday after watching the first session of General Conference, we decided to do some exploring. We started removing the binders one by one, expecting to scare out the mouse. After removing most of them, we finally came to the mouse’s nest – a tidy ball of shredded paper, cloth, and feathers with five baby mice and the mother mouse in it! With much screaming and standing on chairs (Stacey and Hannah), Miriam and I managed to chase them into a trash can and we dispatched them. I’m glad we found the nest before the mouselings grew up and set out on their own. But I also felt a little sad that we had to destroy them. The whole time, I could only think of the “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie” in Robert Burns poem To A Mouse. This poor thing felt she had found the perfect home to raise her babies up there on that shelf, but as the poem says,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Between the first two sessions yesterday, after the mouse massacre, Hannah and I took a quick drive to the Losey Vista in the Susquehannock State Forest just to the south of us. From it, we can look north over the hills of Ulysses, Sweden, and Hector Townships. We went to check out the fall leaves. They were starting to look colorful, but not at their peak yet. We will go again on Thursday to have another look.
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| View from the Losey Vista. |
The week ahead will be busy as I plunge full on into post-frost cleanup. It looks like the weather will cooperate. The forecast says cool and sunny days and clear and chilly nights. I’m hoping the color on the trees will intensify and that we will be treated to some bright blue weather.
