Another great essay from Bill Felker’s lovely essays about his seasonal observations in Yellow Springs, Ohio, taken from Poor Will’s Almanack. This is from August 2004:
When I get up before five these mornings, I sit by my window and I feel the fall moving toward me. Outside, there is no wind; the yard is quiet. The trees and flowers are motionless. The early summer chorus of birds has almost ended. Only a cardinal and a bullfrog sing off and on. Sometimes, the jays are nervous and whine in the trees. Sometimes, I hear crows across town. The katydids stopped calling in the middle of the night. It is too early in the day for cicadas and bees. The August crickets are still growing up; they won’t chant for a few days.
I can’t decide whether the shift in the season has followed the silence or preceded it. I don’t know if my perceptions are real or imaginary. Maybe I’m just restless. It’s been hot since the end of May. The heat wears me down like it wears down the plants and animals, draws life from the garden, the pond, and the brain.
Of course the varieties of flowering plants are different now from what they were a few weeks ago, and the tint of the leaves has deepened in some places, faded in others. There is a haze to the sky; it builds up through the sluggish fronts of middle summer. Maybe that lack of purity is what tells me the earth has shifted on its axis, that it is turning back toward the sun for winter, that I have run out of summer one more time without having kept the promises I made to myself in April.
I have often tried to list the births and deaths of plants, insects and animals that define the shift to autumn. But I have never looked closely enough, have not watched or listened or thought carefully enough, and so the emotions of late summer can comer over me quickly and hard, and I listen to the stillness, trying to understand what has happened, wishing I had paid closer attention, thinking maybe if I really understood the process better, then I wouldn’t feel so bereft at the end.
But no matter how many notes I take, I know that when the birds are quiet in the morning and the wind stops blowing, I am at the end of one more cycle of planning and longing and then I can’t help repeating the same questions I asked a season ago. What next? What should I do now? Will there be enough time? Where do I go from here? How can I make amends for what I haven’t done? Whom should I still love? What does it matter?
The beautiful photo of a haybale on a hazy day was taken by Cate Kerr of Beyond the Fields We Know.
