November 2020

November is departing the year with a grand flourish: it is snowing.  Though very beautiful, most of this November has more or less fit the description Emily Dickinson once gave it, “A few prosaic days/A little this side of the snow/And that side of the haze.”  Then this day arrives, a day of gentle flurries and white-frosted pastures, of the unexpected and the extraordinary.  I can think of no more perfect day on which to bid farewell to autumn and usher in the beautiful season of Advent than this crystalline, frosty, very far from prosaic day.

It sifts from leaden sieves,/It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool/The wrinkles of the road.

 - Emily Dickinson, The Snow

Here at my thoughtful spot the snow has softened the fallen leaves and branches and made the evergreen moss seem brighter.  Along the extremities of the waterfall's ledge, a little distance from the fall itself, hangs a row of dazzling, sparkling icicles.  If you get close to them, you can see the reflection of the all trees and rocks and branches in this little hollow become warped and wobbled into impressionistic blurs of green and brown and white in the uneven surface of the ice.  My favorite winter phenomenon returned this morning - the frost flowers.  I've read that the weather conditions must be just right for them to form, they require freezing air temperature but unfrozen, damp soil, so when they do appear in early winter they must be welcomed with great wonderment.  They look odd from far away, just uneven little clumps of white dotted through the woods, clinging to the base of tall grasses and plants, but upon closer examination these delicate little clusters of satin-like frost are marvelous.  They look something like a paper wasp nest made of ice, or tumbled folds of transparent fabric frozen in movement, or layers of melted sugar as it is being pulled and stretched into candy ribbons. 

 

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds have flown.

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness -

 

- John Updike, November

The tall brown stalks of ironweed and brown-eyed susans (Rudbeckia triloba) are all topped with lovely, prickly seed heads this time of year, and while walking this morning I began to gather a few.  Then I stumbled upon a cluster of wild hydrangeas (Hydrangea arborescens) still covered in tiny dried, four-petaled flowers.  Soon the beautiful colors of November's "certain loveliness" seemed to appear everywhere in the woods, as the evergreen of ceder branches, the red of rose hips, and the bright blushing pink of beautyberries (Callicarpa americana) joined the brown seed and flower heads.  The wild privet (Ligustrum vulgare), whose white flowers fill one short stretch of my walking path with fragrance in the Spring, is now covered in waxy blue berries, poisonous to humans, but delectable to winter songbirds, and they, along with the glossy black berries of the edible greenbriar vine (Smilax rotundifolia), complete a picturesque wintry bouquet.  A glorious autumn has ended in this thoughtful spot, and a peaceful winter has begun.

November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
 
With night coming early
And dawn  coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.
- Clyde Watson

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