Category Archives: Autumn watch

Autumn watch

In this part of the world, this is the best time of year for food.

At the downtown farmer’s market on Thursday, the produce was incredible, and cheap. From Mary, I bought the usual dozen eggs and two loaves of her oatmeal bread, a few pounds of her freshly dug red potatoes, some other vegetables — and she had the first Westport Macomber turnips of the year: huge white mild turnips, originally a cross between radishes and more traditional turnips, which you can eat raw or cooked, a local vegetable that you can’t find outside of southeastern Massachusetts. This turnip is one of the finest fall vegetables and its arrival should be heralded with a trumpet fanfare: a fanfare for the uncommon turnip. From the fruit grower, I got several pounds of Cortland apples; I used to be a big fan of Winesaps and Northern Spies, but his firm white-fleshed Cortlands have a superb texture and make just about the smoothest and best apple sauce: substantial, not at all watery, and nicely flavored. From the Mattapoisett farmers, I got carrots and cantaloupe (they’re still picking cataloupes) and cauliflower and, best of all, cranberries — real cranberries, with little bits of twigs and tiny leaves from the cranberry plant, in all shades of red from deepest crimson to pale green faintly tinged with red: just as small blueberries taste better than the huge agribusiness blueberries you find wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, so real cranberries are more flavorful, both more tart and sweeter at the same time. The next day, we drove out to Alderbrook Farm in Russell’s Mills and bought some local honey, and I made a huge pot of apple cranberry sauce, made from the Cortland apples and the Mattapoisett cranberries and the local honey — it turned a warm reddish-pink color — and I spread it on the oatmeal bread, and ate until I’d eaten too much.

On Friday, Carol called me on my cell phone and said, would I like to go to dinner at the farmer’s house? Carol worked for a couple of days pulling weeds at a nearby organic farm this week; she needed to get out of the house and away from the computer and the freelance writing, besides the fact that a little extra money is always welcome in our household. So we went for dinner at the farmer’s house, with another couple we know slightly. Before dinner, we walked around the farm; it is in its glory in this season. The summer squash spill out over the edges of the raised beds, covered with flowers and half-grown squash; the celery stands large and robust; the fall beets have grown tall leaves, rooted in deep red balls shouldering their way up out of the dirt; the salad greens show bright colors against the dark earth, light green and dark green and deep red. And the herbs were just as beautiful as the salad greens — curly parsley and Italian parsley, rosemary (Carol had weeded the rosemary bed that morning), different kinds of sage, chives, and other herbs I couldn’t recognize. After we met young Murphy, an Irish Jack Russell terrier who is being trained to catch the voles which plague the farm, and Murphy’s owner who was plowing up one bed of the farm with a tractor-mounted rototiller, we went in for dinner. Dinner included New Bedford scallops sauteed in fresh leeks and herbs, boiled potatoes newly dug, sweet and tender, and some kind of wild mushroom I had never eaten before.

So what if today is the autumnal equinox? So what if the nighttime will be longer than the daylight for the next six months? So what if winter is coming in? This is the best time of year for food, the best time of the year to be alive.

Autumn watch

We were almost home after having taken a long walk on a warm and humid afternoon.

Carol looked at her watch. “I thought it was later than it is,” she complained.

“What time is it?” I said.

“Five thirty,” she said.

I glanced up at the sun. “It should be seven thirty,” I said. “The sun is setting way too early now.”

We continued complaining about the rapidly shortening days. It still feels like summer, but it’s starting to look like autumn.

Autumn watch

On the drive from New Bedford up to visit my aunt and uncle this evening, we passed several trees whose leaves are already turning color. The very dry weather we’ve been having for the past two or three weeks has stressed many trees, and the leaves of some trees are turning brown around the edges. Other trees have reacted to the stress by already taking on their fall colors. I noticed one tree in particular, a small Red Maple at the edge of the highway, whose every leaf had turned a vivid scarlet.

On our way home, we drove through a chilly drizzle, blurring the headlights of the oncoming cars, making it feel even more like autumn is coming.

Autumn watch

The sun is setting noticeably earlier every day now.

I left the church just before six and headed to the natural foods store in the West End. As I drove west on Union Street, the sun was almost directly in my eyes, its glare drowning out anything in the shadows of the trees. I drove more slowly than usual, trying to figure out which cross street I was passing, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw the four-way stop sign that I didn’t stop for; the car waiting at the cross street gave a little toot on its horn as if to say to me, “Wake up!”; I felt stupid, but I really hadn’t seen the stop sign in the glare of the sun.

By the time I got back home, it was half past six, and I realized that if I wanted to take a long walk, I had better leave now, before I cooked dinner. At the end of my hour-long walk, the sun had already dipped below New Bedford’s sky line.

Autumn watch

Carol and I went for a walk this evening. We stopped at our tiny garden our in front of our building, and picked the deadheads off the cosmos. The cosmos are starting too look a little blowsy, the chrysanthemum is blooming already, and the aster is getting big. We walked down to the waterfront under dark clouds and occasional spitting rain. The cool air prompted me to zip up my rain coat to stay warm.

As we walked along, I noticed some brown dead leaves had accumulated in a small stairwell near the docks. Putting my own thoughts into words, Carol said, “Oh, it feels like fall.” Cool and rainy, the sun setting noticeably earlier, it did feel like fall this evening. I know perfectly well that we will have many more hot, humid days before summer is truly over. But this evening, we could feel that fall is on its way.

Autumn watch

When I sit down at our dining table, I look right out our second floor window into the red leaves on the maple tree across the street. The north side of the maple is already bare. The other trees in the courtyard across the street lost all their leaves a week ago.

The wind is backing around into the north, and as I sit watching the wind slowly strips one red leaf at a time and sends it fluttering up the street. Red leaves dot the wet stone paving blocks in the street below.

The red maple leaves look particularly brilliant, almost glowing, on this dark, grey, wet day. It’s one of the most beautiful times of year.

happy birthday abs

Cider

Last Thursday, I bought a half gallon of apple cider at the downtown farmer’s market. I made sure it had no preservatives. On Monday, I took it out of the refrigerator, and broke the seal. By this evening, it was foaming nicely, and I just tried a glass: it’s lightly carbonated, tart, and much of the sweetness is gone. It’s still a little too sweet, though, so I’ll leave it out overnight to turn a little more. It is so nicely fermented that I suspect that our kitchen has now become well colonized by yeast that have escaped from our bread-baking.

What better way to celebrate the coming of late fall than by drinking home-fermented cider?

On reading Kenko

The colder autumn weather has finally begun. While I was on spiritual retreat in Wareham early in the week, I managed to take a couple of long walks. My morning walk on Tuesday took me through an old tennis court at the retreat center, now unused except for one small corner where someone has painted a classical, concentric labyrinth. A line of milkweed stalks had managed to grow up through a crack in the pavement during the summer. By the time I walked past them, the stalks were yellowed, and the few leaves that were left were gray, curled, and dead. I find milkweed plants to be most beautiful when they have died from frost:– the curled leaves take on fantastic shapes, the gray pimpled seed pods burst open releasing the seeds with their white downy parachutes that will enable the wind to spread the seeds far afield.

In the middle of the woods — I had gotten off the path chasing some small brown woodland bird — I came across a few ferns that still had a little green. Most of the ferns in the forest had been bitten by frost, curled and brown. Yet in this one clump, presumably more sheltered, I found one frond mostly green, another frond mostly yellow with a touch of faded green, another frond brown at the top and yellow lower down, and the rest of the fronds brown and curled and dead. A month of autumn visible in one clump of ferns.

On my way to Agawam Cemtery, a couple of miles away, I passed a cranberry bog looking reddish purple in the slanting afternoon light. The berries had already been ahrvested, but the bog had a quiet beauty nonetheless.

In 1330 in the Tsurezuregusa, the Japanese writer Kenko said:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring — these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. Are poems written on such themes as “Going to view the cherry blossoms only to find they had scattered” or “On being prevented from visiting the blossoms” inferior to those on “Seeing the blossoms”? People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, “This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms. There is nothing worth seeing now.” In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting….

When I got to Agawam Cemetery, I searched out the oldest gravestones. You can tell the general age of New England gravestones from their shapes, and the type of stone from which they are cut. I found twenty or thirty slate stones that clearly dated from the last half of the 18th C., mostly from the Federal era but some earlier. Most of the 18th C. stones in Agawam Cemetery are shallowly carved and covered more or less in lichen, and in most cases the lichens completely obliterate the inscription. The inscriptions half seen, half guessed at and half covered in lichen, are just as fascinating as stones where the entire inscription is visible. On one of the most beautiful stones, the inscription was no longer visible, the inscribed surface was actually flaking away; the beauty lay in its deterioration.

Walking back from the cemetery to the retreat center, I walked through suburban houses on their tight little lots. Since this is a seaside town in which the population explodes in the summer, “No Trespassing” signs appear everywhere. I passed a new house going in, a bulldozer parked beside the house, the entire lot scraped clean, showing the poor, sandy soil. The pine and oak woods that used to cover the land here were cut down for farming, grew back up again when the farms failed, and now the woods are being cut down once again for summer houses and gated communities.

More than one sign at the beginning of a road declared: “Members and Their Guests Only.” If they didn’t have those signs, the pressure from the growing population would mean the property owners would have invaders constantly traipsing through their land, past their summer house, headed for the sea. Can we say that the suburban houses, the gated communities, the signs are any less beautiful than the pine and oak woods they replace? For how long can the houses and signs last — a century or two, at most, before they fall into rack and ruin and something else replaces them. Although with global warming, what may well replace these houses is the open ocean, raging under the influence of huge coastal storms. Kenko never anticipated global warming completely changing the normal cycle of the seasons, nor did he ever anticipate that cherry blossoms might stop blooming entirely in their ancestral range.

On retreat: Autumn watch

Wareham, Mass. I was sitting at the breakfast table talking to some ministers whom I hadn’t seen in a while, when Rachel, the program chair for this retreat, came around and said the morning’s program was about to begin. The other ministers filed in to hear the rest of the presentation by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd. Even though I strongly disagreed with Dowd’s presentation last night, where he described an eco-theology grounded in a grand narrative of the universe, I felt that I should keep an open mind and go hear more. Then I thought to myself:– Would I rather sit indoors and listen to someone talk theology, or would I rather go outdoors to take a long walk? I went quietly upstairs to get my coat and binoculars, and slipped out the back door of the retreat center.

Cloudy and cold this morning, a real mid-autumn day. Birds filled the bushes along the edge of the retreat center’s lawn: Gold-crowned Kinglets, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Song Sparrows, catbirds, cardinals, and even a Hermit Thrush. I bushwhacked to the edge of the little estuary. As I came down to the edge of the salt marsh, a Great Blue Heron squawked, crouched, and leapt into the air, tucking his neck back and slowly pulling his long legs up against his body. Some of the trees surrounding the salt marsh were already bare of leaves; one or two maples still covered in brilliant red leaves; the white oaks shone dull gold in the subdued light; a few trees were still green. The tide was quite high, and I skirted the high water through the salt marsh hay. One high bush blueberry, a bush about five feet high growing right at the edge of the marsh, was covered in deep, glowing red leaves; I only noticed that small bush because the trees around it were already bare and grey.

After a long walk, I wound up on the Wareham town beach. A fisherman stood at the far end of the beach, where the sand ends in a little spit sticking out into an estuary winding up through extensive salt marshes.

“Catching anything?” I said.

“Not today,” he said. “Caught a little striper yesterday.”

I said that was pretty good; it’s late to catch a striper this far north.

He was feeling talkative, and we chatted idly for a few minutes. “What are you looking for?” he said, noticing the binoculars hanging around my neck.

“Ducks,” I said. “The ducks should be here by now. But I’m not really seeing any. Maybe because it’s been so warm, and they’re just not moving down onto their wintering grounds yet.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying about the stripers this year,” he said. “They should be gone by now, but it’s still warm so they’re staying up here.”

Every year, the story is a little different. The fall migrants generally move on at about the same time, but a Hermit Thrush might stay a little later than usual. The striped bass run south, but one year that might leave a little earlier or later than another year. Some years a few maple trees hold their leaves a little longer, or a blueberry bush turns a particularly bright red. The same story is told year after year, and it’s always the same but always different. That’s the only grand narrative I care about, a grand narrative that’s not told in words.