Sweet October

It's a dusky sort of morning, and the crickets are confused. A trilling frog is in the tree in front of me - I wonder if it is so dark in the depths of those branches that he thinks the sun is still quite low on the morning horizon.  Perhaps Dawn has yet to lift her head and stretch her rosy fingers towards the drowsy thoughts of little living things.  But no! A sunbeam has found the little singer through the fir needles, and he is silent. I don't know why the morning seems so dim. The sky above me has few clouds, the patches of blue are bright, but the world here below is dusted in gray. 
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​It is enough - / To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
​While the robin sings over again / Sad songs of Autumn mirth.

​- Edward Thomas, Digging (1)

​Summer lingered this year.  Every time I think it must be time to pull up the tomatoes and zinnias, I bring in an armload so beautiful and abundant that, though the soil is cold as I plant winter seeds and I'm wearing a sweater as I water most mornings, I simply cannot say goodbye to summer. In this year's garden, it seems that each late summer fruit is the color of autumn leaves, so, as the foliage has gone, or is going, mostly straight from green to brown this fall, still the yellows and rusts and reds and pumpkin oranges that some years are in the trees, are in this year's fruits and flowers. 

But autumn, though sometimes hiding, is well and truly here.   Each day the air sharpens, the leaves moulder, the days shorten. What is it about this season that stirs contradictions?  In every chill morning gray there is a call to adventure, in every soft evening amber there is an invitation home.  October always seems the time to begin something new, almost more than spring, I think.  In May the call of the outdoors is impossible to resist, and the bustle of possibility and planting and blooming and daylight abundance is so all-consuming and vibrant that there is simply no time or need to plan or to think that you might be accomplishing some great task. 
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​But October beckons us to wander.  It is a time that wakens the mind, that pulls us out of the daily routine that has so beautifully fallen into place through the summer, and instills a hunger for greatness and wonder and change.  Even little changes - the beginning of a new book in the extra hour of evening darkness, the rerouting of a morning walk to find those particular acorns with caps that look trimmed in fur - these are full of greatness and wonder.  One has to wander in October, and make time to cultivate mighty thoughts, for these will be our companions through the winter, when the hummingbirds and crickets and flurry of garden beauty is vanished awhile. 

​​There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

- Bliss Carman, Vagabond Song

​With last weeks' rain the grass has begun to green. After a summer of crispness and brown, it is lush again at last, just in time to don the first frost.  I am back in the Greenhouse garden now, seeds are ripening all around me, each so different, from morning glories in their paper wrappers, to calendula in curling clusters, (each seed looks rather like an octopus' tentacle, I've always thought), and even the giant Osage oranges I found on my walk this morning, brightly scented and brain-shaped, filled with a hundred future thorny hedges.  If that doesn't make one marvel I don't know what can.
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​We live our lives in unknowns.  Perhaps this autumn in particular, as confusions and uncertainties in country and culture burrow into my thoughts, co-opt them and turn them from faith, hope, constancy.  A honey bee is going from bloom to blossom in the lemony nasturtium beside me, disappearing for an instant, then clumsily backing out to the fragile petals. His fat pollen sacks almost glow bright orange. The hum of crickets and the tree frog's chirrup has begun again - it is evening.  
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We were created in a world of patterns.  Isn't that a beautiful thing?   The bees will retire to their hives in a few weeks and hide until March.  I will be a committed homebody again by Thanksgiving.  The tree frogs will be silent until May.  But now, at this precise moment, they sing.  The gardens shout their last colorful hurrah.  The misty roads whisper tales of adventure to my nomad heart.  Perhaps October is a reminder to hold fast to the constants, and delight with patience in the transients.  For we are very little creatures in a very wide world, after all.  Thank God for that. 

​So come, sweet October / All this will come together
Sunsets in sweet October skies...

- Aoife Scott, Sweet October
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