An October Poem

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow 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.

           –   Robert Frost

Changing Seasons

With the traditional close of summer last weekend and the official close only a week and a half away, people are starting to gear up for fall. Autumnal colors have cropped up in displays and advertisements, and Halloween accoutrement are beginning to appear in stores everywhere. Seasons are changing.

I know a lot of people are somewhat saddened by the passing of summer, especially those who have to go back to school and those who see fall as little more than a harbinger of another winter. But fall is my favorite season. It has been for as long as I can remember. Summer was always great – full of days spent in the sun and water, watching clouds and rolling in the grass – but autumn brought the year’s best weather and brightest colors. It meant going back to school and re-joining friends I had not seen all summer (and, yes, I was one of the few children who didn’t mind school). Fall also meant the sweets and candies of Halloween, the fantastic dishes of Thanksgiving (as well as the leftovers for the days that followed), and, if we were lucky, the first snow.

Now my point of view is different, but my enjoyment and excitement have hardly changed. Autumn contains the last opportunities given by the living seasons – begun in the first green shoots of spring and finished in the last colored leaves of fall. It is the last chance to get out there and shake a leg before the frosts become icicles hanging from the eaves and a howling winter wind drives us – and most other animals – inside for shelter and warmth. It is a celebration of life, of having survived thus far.

It is also a reminder that winter is just around the corner. It is a last chance to settle warm-weather affairs and prepare for the cold-weather challenges to come. It is a reminder that to all things there is a season, and that someday Death will nip us as easily as frost does flowers. It heralds an end of things, but also the hope of new beginnings, however far off they may seem. And what a way to go: all beauty and color and light before that last long darkness.

I love fall. I hope you will enjoy it as well.

Armchair Swimmers

I have returned from my trip, which took longer than I expected and was much harder to re-settle from than I’d anticipated.

My first full day back, I didn’t even bother to unpack. I grabbed a couple folding chairs, a good friend, and headed for the creek. The weatherman had called for clouds all day but they were gone by ten o’clock so we waded into the creek in full sunshine and set up our chairs where the water ran wide and shallow. I jostled a position upstream of a large rock I planned to use as a footrest for my feet and my friend dug a hole for his. We lounged, surrounded by gurgling brightness, and talked for hours about anything we could think of.

Sports, religion, politics, the economy, the future… I love good conversations with good friends. They keep me sane.

We finally retired in the afternoon, grabbed a bite of picnic lunch sitting under great pine trees, and discovered we were sunburned. Apparently neither of us were as tanned as we would have liked to believe. We spent the rest of the day in the shade, edging along gravel bars to follow the shadows. At times neither of us would talk for an hour or more.

Sometimes silence is perfect conversation, too. And it is wholly necessary for my well-being, the more the better.

There is no silence, of course. The air was full of sound from the creek and birdsong and wind in the trees and insects busily buzzing at their errands. But I consider that music, and also an essential.

As the day drew its shades we headed home, a good day gone all too quickly. But more lie ahead. That is the important thing.

Of Beauty and Butterflies

I went hiking the other day. It was breezy but warm and the nicest day we’d had for a stretch, and I wanted to get out and enjoy it. So I went to a bit of national woods not far away and walked a trail I’ve been through several times but had not visited in years. Much was the same, of course, and much was different.

An ice storm this winter hit the area hard. The trail often diverted from its original route to bypass tangles of downed trees and even where it did not divert there were colonies of stumps wearing skirts of sawdust. Some of the oldest trees in the area lay on the ground in cross-crossing lines with their roots in the air. It was almost painful to walk through. But there were protected areas, pristine little pockets behind hillsides and sweeping ridgelines, sheltered from the wind that accompanied the ice and caused most of the damage. In one of these pockets I stopped to rest.

A large shelf of rock spotted with mosses and lichens ran exposed through a narrow meadow-like opening on the steep hillside. It made an excellent seat. Surrounded by oak and pine, cedar and hickory, it was perfectly calm and flooded with warm mid-day sunshine. A small bronze-colored lizard with long dark stripes peeked out from under a tiny overhang in the rock that I hadn’t even noticed beforehand but vanished when I finally had to shift on my stone seat. A large patch of wildflowers swarmed the lower end of the clearing where the shelf of rock melted back into dark earth, violets and sheep shire, buttercups and phlox, false garlic and bluets scattered on the ground like confetti. Among their bright blooms, which drifted into the woods amid lazy sunbeams like something straight out of a Thomas Kincade painting, a few little butterflies hovered and flitted. Some were solid yellow, others colorfully spotted, and the smallest of them were white with orange piping at the edges of their wings. They tasted this blossom, then that one, seemingly unable to choose a favorite, dancing from one spring buffet to the next.

“They get to live their whole lives here,” I mused. “All they will ever know is this tiny paradise.”

I envied them. Beautiful and perfect, they danced on air. Their lives were short but enchanted, if only for one untainted afternoon. But, then, so was mine. I sighed and moved on, climbing farther and farther up the hilll until the trail broke out of the woods and wound the narrow edge of a bluff high above the crystal clear creek I had left just below the parking area. It was a lovely vista, a wide panorama of the creek valley and hills beyond, all broken ranges and steep hollows just beginning to don the golden-green cloak of spring. Redbuds flamed in purple brilliance and dogwoods floated like drifts of snow in the trees. I tried to soak it in, memorize every wrinkle of the hills, every sharp edge of rimrock, every curve of the creek so I could pull the memory out for later use and relive the simple glory of stillness and spring on a rocky bluff outcrop. I think I managed pretty well.

So now, even on long dark days when the sun does not shine for me, I can recall these memories and cling to the knowledge that it is not only butterflies who dance in the air and lead lives full of beauty.

Boykin Creek

I recently had the opportunity to visit the East Texas Piney Woods region and found a lovely little spot on Boykin Creek. It was a short visit, unfortunately, but so very pleasant while it lasted.

Boykin Creek was dammed back in the 1930′s by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the many Depression-era work programs created by then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt). The result was a small lake with dark water and a fascinating secret: here there be springs. According to locals, several small springs feed into the lake bottom and others dot the parkland, preserved as part of the National Forest complex. Three can be found within easy walking distance of the main parking area and the largest is quite an attraction.

Filling the immediate area with a sulphurous hint, the spring bubbles out of sandstone rocks and tumbles into a small stream, doubling its output just before it runs into Boykin Creek a few hundred yards below the dam. And there, at their convergence, I found a lovely little slice of life.

Two long, white sandbars lined the clear water’s edge, under pines and oaks and magnolias that towered overhead and rocked back and forth in the insistent breeze. At stream level it was nearly quiet, just a light puff of air now and then invading the streambed, cupped between rocky, sandy banks some eight feet tall. The banks and meandering path of streambed cornered the sandbars in an almost invisible location, one I stumbled on merely by chance. And immediately fell in love with.

At the first opportunity I retreated to these sandbars, shed my footwear in the warm afternoon sunshine, and rolled my pantlegs in preparation of exploration. I waded back and forth across the cold creek, reveling in the soft sand under my feet, between my toes. It’s been years since I was barefoot on the sand. Oh how I missed it.

After wading to my heart’s content (it took a while), I padded across a wide sandbar and sat on the downed trunk of a large pine. The air was fragrant and light, the sand warm and dappled with sunshine, and I was unspeakably happy to just sit there and stare at the treetops nodding high above.

No computers or televisions coerced me into an electronic stupor, no radios blared music at earth-shaking volumes, there was just water and earth and trees, sun and clouds and wind. And me.

The perfect afternoon inevitably ended – and much, much too soon – but not before I had reclaimed some part of me I had unknowingly misplaced these last several months.

It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it. Thank you Boykin Creek.