Nature Owes Us One

After the leaves have turned beautiful colors, and after the first hard frost, we are supposed to get a stretch of mild, shirtsleeve weather. We expect it as our due. But what to call that late grace period that didn’t come (yet?) this year? 

The term “Indian summer” gets mixed reviews these days. Not all Native Americans find it offensive, but since it falls into a general kettle of questionable phrases, what else might we substitute?

As decades go by in my life (with increasing speed), the meaning of “old woman’s summer” becomes clearer and clearer to me. Old people want to be warm! Not all old people want to be called old, though. Anyway, old woman's or old wives' summer is European terminology. In England and also in Europe the welcome warm spell following frost is sometimes called St. Martin’s or St. Luke’s summer, but we are not in England, and those names have no familiar connotations for us.

“Last chance summer” works for me. In wintry northern Michigan, it sounds a especially poignant tone. Though "halcyon days" is awfully nice, too.

Please, Mother Nature, please give us one last chance! Even if we have no intention of raking leaves until spring, it would be good to get that lawn furniture put away!

How Long Is a Day?

Return to the West, II: How Long Is a Day?

Information on times for sunrise and sunset are readily available for any intersection of latitude and longitude, for any day of the year, but clock times given don’t take into account trees, hills, mountains, or canyons. Here in Michigan, someone living deep in the woods, west of a high, wooded ridge will experience sunrise much later than a Lake Huron shoreline dweller. Dark comes earlier in the woods, too. The beginning and end of a Michigan day are gradual, anyway, even along the shores of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior, often with subtle, soft edges and muted tints.

Desert and mountain sunrises and sunsets are more tropical – at least, from what I’ve read of the tropics. They are not, except on the occasional cloudy morning or evening, long drawn-out affairs. The sky grows light before the sun itself appears, but once up that sun is anything but subtle. So, too, when it drops below the western horizon at day’s end, dark is a sudden presence. (Absence of light = presence of dark.)

On this spring Sunday in northern Michigan, with cold, grey skies promising a gloomy day, precipitation probable, I remember very different mornings, those of our ghost town cabin in the high desert. In Dos Cabezas, if I woke when the sky was still dark, the lights of distant houses and ranches winked against the blackness, as they had the evening before. Slowly, then, gradually, unrelieved blackness would give way to indistinct, shadowy hills. At first the mountains were more suspicion than reality, themselves untrustworthy, but when at last the sun set fire to the mountain horizon the light would be instantly implacable, flat and white and pitiless, and the reality of the mountains revealed – falsely, of course, as we know from geology lessons -- as immutable.

After a night cold enough to make gas heat welcome in the cabin, morning remained cool enough that I habitually wore a heavy, rough suede jacket lined with wool fleece for the day’s initial sortie, a walk with my dog down into the dry wash. The Philadelphia Wash, one of the neighbors called it. Like rivers and creeks in Michigan, the washes in Arizona have names, though it is generally only the locals who know them. In summer storms dangerous torrents of water from the mountains rush through: in winter only patterns in the sand show where water sometimes flows. The wash was easier walking than the desert itself, because beyond the wash one must thread carefully through mesquite and catclaw (jacket and boots necessary protection), and the ground throughout our part of Dos Cabezas was littered with strands and pieces of rusty barbed wire, rusty old tin cans, and all kinds of broken glass, remnants of an old dump as well as the ghost town itself, with wire fences strung to keep cows out of various parcels of property.

Down in the dry wash, in midwinter, where frost inhabited shaded areas until they were reached by sunlight, morning’s bird was the pyruloxxia, Arizona’s “silver cardinal,” singing from bare branches of leafless winter scrub oaks. The color palette of the winter high desert was limited to dusty browns and greys and grey-greens, relieved only by the bright green of creosote bush. Day or night, the smell was of dust. Sometimes, also, if they were near the cabin, there was the living fragrance of cows. The creosote bush, if brushed against, had its own strong smell, of course, but the primary smells were, first dust, second cows.

(Later in the season, furry leaves of the little bajada lupine, a beautiful flower at close range but low and small enough to be easily overlooked, offered drops of dew, held carefully like transparent glass beads. Tiny, delicate toadflax and stands of frail desert leeks, both with heavenly light-blue flowers, cast slender shadows on the ground. Primrose opened wide to the morning, some yellow, others almost white but lightly tinted pink. None of the early spring blooms of the high desert are large or showy. All are shy and close to the ground, living, it seems, on the scant moisture from morning dew.)

The heat of midday brought with it the illusion that the afternoon sun stood unchanging for hours, but spending those hours around the cabin dispelled the illusion, demonstrating by movement of shade that the sun too was moving across the cloudless sky. The front steps, facing south, however, were always in full sun, the tiny back deck, under an extension of the roof, looking off to the Cabezas, always shaded.

Every morning my first self-appointed task was to make coffee. As soon as darkness began to leak away, I would begin opening venetian blinds -- those on the east opened last and never all the way, because David liked to stay in bed later, the two west windows and one north over the sink all the way as soon as the sun was up.

Windows and blinds facing south were most judiciously and gradually adjusted, slats tilted to let in light but guard privacy (although the road was some distance from the cabin), the tilt monitored and changed little by little until finally maximum light streamed in. Before we left for the day’s adventures, however, we closed those south blinds tight, for while morning’s warmth was comforting, a full afternoon of sunlight would have turned the small cabin into an oven by later in the day.

When we came home in late afternoon, we would slide a few windows open from the bottom and open the south blinds partway, on a slant, permitting evening air to circulate until sunset (which came on early in January and gradually later as the weeks went by), when I closed all windows and blinds tight again, this time to hold in whatever of the day’s heat remained. As the season advanced, we also took to leaving the heavy front and back doors of the cabin open in the evenings so that air might pass through the cabin by way of the screen doors, taking away the heat of the day.

During the day, a large mirror above the gas heater faced the front door, and the mirror would reflect and intensify the south light in the cabin’s interior. There was no excluding the sun. Even with the blinds fully closed, the days were awash in light. Meanwhile, monitoring and adjusting light and air through windows and blinds was an integral part of each desert day’s ritual, and I relished the task, set for me by the sun and mountains rather than by any capricious human mandate.

At night, against the endless black of the sky, the shining stars far outnumbered those even in our northern Michigan sky, while cows continued to shuffle around the cabin, grazing in the dark. Off in the distance rose a coyote chorus, sounding much farther from the cabin than our northern Michigan coyotes sound from our old farmhouse, where they seem to be serenading us from below our bedroom window, though it’s doubtful they are any closer than the willow-lined creek. 

Stars and coyotes in the high desert – so familiar, so like home, and yet reminding us constantly that we were somewhere else, very far from home.

Arrival of Autumn, 2014

Back road, Leelanau, October

One day in August the eye catches a few leaves turned prematurely red on an otherwise green tree, and that red-bearing twig is an intimation, but it is still August, after all, until August slides seamlessly into September, but even then every day is still full of warmth and sun or, if rain comes along, the thunderstorms come like summer rain, passing quickly, with returning blue sky and warm light and every petal and leaf and edge in sharp, bright focus and lake waters still inviting swimmers free of school, and it seems that this year, at last, impossible wishes will be granted, and summer will never end. The solstice slips by, unremarked. And then one day it comes.

People sniff the air like dogs. Some shiver and reach for sweaters, while others breathe deeply and smile. The air is damp and carries a rich, earthy aroma of mold and decay. All around, warm life appears wrapped in a thin, transparent, crackling sheet of interstellar cold, the heat and the cold held in tension, equally powerful, the outcome of their struggle still in doubt, while underfoot the soil is breathing so slowly it almost seems to be holding its breath, and by the edge of the woods, where yesterday there was only grass and Queen Anne’s-lace and milkweed, today there is a silent ring of small brown mushrooms, and further down the hill a cluster of puffballs, and out in the meadow the deep rose and pale lavender and deep purple of asters have opened to the late-arriving dawn.

“Indian summer,” say the tourists, happy for the fall color, but there’s been no hard frost yet. This is simply fall. Summer is over at last.

Maybe there will be Indian summer after the frost this year, and maybe there won’t. For now, apples, pumpkins and squash jostle late sweet corn, tomatoes and zucchini at the busy farmstands, and while the time for elderberries and blueberries is past, ripe blackberries can yet be plucked from unruly canes. (It’s too soon to gather wild grapes, which need a frost to make them sweet.) Hay has been cut and baled. Here and there sowings of winter rye green the fields.

Hawks sightings are rarer now, although for weeks the hawks were everywhere, along the highways and high above the fields. The memory of monarch butterflies, single individuals and rare, sparse clouds, is prolonged by shared photographs and stories, as Canada geese, the last of the season’s migrants to depart, gather on the ground to debate flight schedules.

Wild turkeys are gathering, also, in larger and larger groups, but they, like the chickadees, will stay throughout the winter. They are not fair-weather residents. The deer will stay, too, as will coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and all species of mouse. 

Ah, the mice! Whenever there is a sudden change in the weather, mice can be expected to invade the house. Days and nights suddenly become cold, the first fall nights of furnace heat, triggering a rush of immigrants, but months later on a winter thaw will bring them in again. As long as the weather is settled, they seem to stay put. It’s different with the coyotes, abroad on every calm night and still day, signaling to each other with yips and howls, coming nearer the house or at least seeming too, their voices perhaps only sounding closer as the air grows colder.

It's Far From Over

Anyone who thinks fall color is over is walking around with eyes closed--or, more likely, driving around with eyes closed, which is even scarier. 

Question varies, answer remains the same

Answer: It varies from year to year.

Question could be any of the following:

What’s winter like here?

How much snow do you get?

When do the cherry trees blossom?

How hot is it in summer?

What’s the best week to catch fall color?

Rumblings Around Leelanau

Thunder rumbling is what we need. Well, rain is what we really need. The rumblings, however, are coming mostly from agricultural machinery. Old orchards are coming out, and land is being cleared for new trees. That’s the noise from the south end of the township.

Up at the north end, a young bear has been sighted several times, in different places. The hairy youth has caused no problems so far, but dog walkers are being careful where they wander.

It’s summer’s end and fall’s begining, and that spells fruit flies Up North. One thing that can be said for fruit flies is that they’re quiet. They arrive, they annoy, they die—and all without a sound!

On Failing to Make the Leap

Memory tends to exaggerate. Memory takes an event that occurred once and perhaps was repeated two or three times and converts it to “always.” Thus memory tells me that my birth family, the nuclear family of father, mother and three little girls, was “always late.” The annual event that stands out in memory's files is arriving late to church the Sunday in spring when we should have set our clocks ahead an hour. It cannot really be the case that we forgot to re-set the clocks throughout my childhood, consistently, year after year, and yet that is how I remember it. I remember (painfully) our family arriving after the service had already begun, having completely missed the preceding Sunday School classes, and having to walk past the entire congregation, down the center aisle, to the only remaining empty pews, those in the first few rows of the church. In later years, during my adolescence, we were able to use the side aisle, but our embarrassment (I speak for myself and my sisters) was hardly mitigated, as all five of us sang in the choir, and all five—one bass, one alto and two sopranos—had missed the processional, and so we had to find our way, a tardy little robed-up quintet, into the choir corral (which must have another name, but it was not a "loft," not elevated in any way, just up in front of everyone) after the rest of the choir had marched in together and been seated on schedule.

This is my association with the “spring forward” time change, which I recall as being “invariably” neglected in our family household. We girls burned with shame. The family tardiness was hardly restricted to one day a year: that day simply stood out for reasons of its special noteworthiness and the annual--or not--repetition of the failing.

In adult life, determined not to repeat family history, my sisters and I developed a habit of allowing extra time in transit and arriving early for any and all appointments, usually with a book to read until the person we were meeting would show up on time. We didn’t mind waiting before the appointed hour. (Past the hour was different.) Our concern was not to keep anyone else waiting. I must admit, however, that when a friend described me as “punctual,” intending a compliment, I perceived the dismissive back of a hand. Who wants to be praised with such a goody two-shoes adjective?

Today is Sunday, the 13th of March, and I had a three o’clock appointment this afternoon. I prepared carefully, assembling representative books from and photo images of my sweet bookstore. David and I got to town early and made our usual rounds. I noted the time on the car clock countless times, calculating when we should turn toward the chosen rendez-vous.

We entered the bookstore downtown with what I had calculated was “plenty of time” for my meeting in the cafe. I looked at the clock. It was confusing, disorienting. Was it one of those trick clocks that some bars have, with the time shown backwards? No, I tried mentally flipping the image, and it still wasn’t right. Had the clock stopped? No, the minute hand was still jerking at intervals to show the passage of another sixty seconds. How long did it take me to decipher the face and realize that the time was 3:50? How long did it take me to remember that I should have----?

Yes, I had forgotten to spring forward. I had failed to make the leap. Confident in my preparations, all day I had labored under a delusion, now too late to correct. Oddly enough, at the time I should have been walking through that door, I had been talking to my mother and telling her I had a three o’clock appointment. But her days of having to hurry little girls to church and music lessons and 4-H meetings are long past. It’s up to me now. Most of the time I do pretty well. Not today, though. Rats!

Practicing Self-Denial

As everyone knows, today is Mardi Gras, the festival preceding the 40 days of Lent, but while Mardi Gras has become synonymous with orgies of self-indulgence, Lenten observances have mostly fallen by the wayside. I can’t help wondering: what is the point of a stand-alone Fat Tuesday?

“The purpose of Lent is to be a season of fasting, self-denial, Christian growth, penitence, conversion, and simplicity,” reads another site I found online. This site likens Lenten observance to a “spiritual spring cleaning.”

Even without Christian theology, a period of spring self-denial can make sense. In earlier centuries, winter stores were probably pretty low by March, and tightening belts was a way to get through until planting season. For spoiled and self-indulgent modern Americans, on the other hand, it can be as simple as a diet to shed unwanted winter pounds. What is “given up,” doesn’t have to be food, of course, but the basic idea is disciplined self-denial.

My first idea was to give up complaining for Lent, but after a few days’ reflection I realized that complaining is something I should give up, anyway, not something good to deny myself temporarily. Still, it wouldn’t be self-denial if it weren’t something tempting that has tremendous power over me. What could it be?

I’m thinking coffee. It’s a big step, but I want to take a big step. I want to clean my spirit along with my house.