Moving too fast!

Whew!  I did not intend for Roundtop Ruminations to sit idle for a week.  Sometimes life moves so fast, I don’t know where it goes.  I do have a good excuse for one day of my idleness—a power outage when the outside temperature was 16 degrees.  Fortunately, my little fireplace kept me warm enough until the power returned. 

My second excuse is one I shouldn’t have, given my age and years of experience I have dealing with it.  Somehow, every year I still find myself in a similar pickle.  The shortened hours of daylight make it difficult to get photos.  It is dark when I get home from work.  And though it is light enough to see by when I leave the cabin in the mornings, the light isn’t very good.  This is evidenced by today’s photo, which is further worsened by a morning fog that was only just starting to dissipate.

Around the cabin, I am dealing with the roller coaster ride that is November. Record lows to record highs. Repeat.  Then add snow for Wednesday.  Perhaps a good bit of snow. Not Buffalo type snow but a lot of snow considering that today is above 60 degrees.  One day I hibernate among the cuddling animals, the next I am outside in my flipflops.  I have used so many coats this week—everything from my heaviest down parka to an unlined rain jacket.  Even for November these changes are extra extreme this year.  And now, I’m going to go dig out one of my snow shovels...

Pre-winter

The forest around me is preparing for winter.  The life of the forest and the surrounding landscape is sinking into the ground, safe below the surface, to hibernate there until spring. What’s seen above the ground is almost uniformly brown, with the shades varying from pale beige to the deepest color of espresso.

The dying of summer’s greenery puts the land in sharper relief.  What was hidden by a shield of foliage is visible again.  Only the skeletons of summer remain.  The earth seems to be taking a breath or perhaps holdings its breath.  Pre-winter is quiet, a respite between the glory of autumn and the stresses of winter.

I like this time of year, this pre-winter of November, when I can actually feel the landscape slow down and prepare for slumber.  Nothing is hidden during this time—not by snow or leaves. Everything stands in stark relief.  Even the rolling of the hills stands out more.  It’s a pretty time of year, I think, though not showy like October (well, most Octobers).

November is the coolest month

I’ve always found November to be an interesting month. I suspect some of my feeling that way has to do with the sudden openness of the forest after months of living encased in the greenery of the summer. The longer vistas let me see the rise and fall of the terrain, too. Little hillocks or slight depressions are visible again. A tiny draw appears where the landscape appeared to be undifferentiated, and my eye can follow its length down the mountain.

Fungus that were there all the time are visible again, too, and looking for their interesting shapes and sizes is one thing I look forward to. Turkey tail fungus is the most prevalent here, though sometimes I suspect my poor identification skills either lets me see those more often or that I am misidentifying some as that when they are really something else that I haven’t learned about yet.

The night sky is visible again too, without having to leave the cover of the forest to see it. The stars peek through the skeletons of the sleeping oaks, and the lights from an occasional passing airplane tell me that I’m not really all that far from civilization after all.

I love the smell of the late autumn forest. It’s crisp and earthy in air that’s moister than the inside of my cabin. The scent seems almost spicy to my nose, but when I inhale deeply to try and identify it, the aroma skitters away and disappears. Each season has its own scent, and fall’s scent contains a little winter, a bit of summer and something of its own, all mixed together.

Raccoon raids are a nightly adventure. Last night one was thwarted by my empty bird feeders, but that didn’t stop it from nosing around looking for something. The prowling threw Baby Dog into a barking frenzy and that woke up Doodle, my rooster, who started to crow at 3 a.m. I was awakened and had to get up, turn on the outside light and prove to Baby Dog that the thief had gone. I could hear it scurrying away through the downed leaves. That’s one thing about November I could do without, though it will be December before the raccoon stops its nightly forays and stays closer to its den.

Pity Poor November

I find I am growing restive during this never-ending November that is trying to fill in for the missing months of winter. Poor November, stuck here for weeks, with no relief in sight, no sign of December, January and February anywhere. Who knows where they’ve gone? The only thing November is sure of is that she can’t leave until some new month, any new month, shows up and lets her off the hook to take a much-needed break.

November is tired of being here. I’m tired of entertaining that same old month. November has been here so long, I should start charging rent. Months should only last 30 days or 31 at the outside. November is closing in on 100 days now with no sign of picking up her bags and leaving.

And it’s not poor November’s fault either. She was ready to go, she wanted to go after her allotted 30 days. It’s just that her co-months, her month-partners, never showed up. They’ve left her hanging, waiting at the bus stop for the entire winter. November is angry about that but can’t even chew out those unfeeling, unthinking months of December, January and February because she can’t find them anywhere.

Sometimes November worries that something really nasty has happened to her co-months. She just doesn’t know what that could be. Other times, she is so angry with those missing months that she almost can pass for December or February. November is ready to strangle them all. She suspects the fault lies with January, somehow. January has always been a tough month, with little regard for the other months. Sometimes January has a lot of influence on December and February, too much influence, November thinks.

At this point, November is hoping that March will arrive and relieve her suffering, but she doesn’t know how to contact March. March probably doesn’t even know that anything strange is going on. And so November waits, still here, still waiting for another month to show up and let her go on a long, and much-needed, vacation.

Silence of the Season

November is a favorite time of the year for me. When the leaves are down, I can see deep into the woods. Deer step gingerly over downed trees, a hundred yards or more from the cabin, yet I can still watch them. Life in the woods and my busy life around the cabin finally starts to slow down. It’s as though the bustle of the summer’s long days drops a little further away with every leaf that falls.

The forest will soon begin its winter sleep and is already settling towards that. Where just a few weeks ago a riot of green once blocked my view, now only bare trees, empty of all color except brown, is all that stands in front of me.

Sounds travel further now than they do in summer, a difference that I seem to forget every year. It’s perhaps the one difference between summer and winter where I would choose to keep summer’s silence. And even in summer, the silence isn’t complete. The rustle of the leaves in the slightest summer breeze blocks some sounds, though the leaves themselves create a constant background music. Still, in the summer the forest’s leaves act as a kind of leaf-thin barrier that over distance turns into thousands of leaves and blocks many of the sounds of modern life’s intrusions.

Although perhaps 30-40% of the leaves remain on the trees now, this is still quite a change from even a week ago. So this morning before dawn as Dog and I walked in the fog, the sound of a fire siren from more than three miles away sounded loud to me. In summer, I rarely hear the siren at all. I believe the fog and the slight breeze also combined to help enhance the sound, but still modern life suddenly seemed much closer than I like to think it really is.

Dog looked up, hearing the trucks as they headed out the road. He hates cars, trucks, bicycles, anything that moves faster than he does. He was convinced the truck was just behind us and lunged at the lead trying to go after it. In his excitement he even missed seeing four deer that tip-toed from the pond, up a bank and through a hole in the netting at the base of the ski slopes.
The sound of the fire trucks faded quickly, and quiet returned to the mountain. November is here, and with it the silence of the season returns.