I don’t have to be an astronomer to recognize an Autumn equinox. The precise time, perhaps, the day and hour and second beyond the minute, is a matter to be calculated by rules of celestial mechanics; but the season, the time of change, is written on every bough and punctuated by every blade of grass. The blind can hear it and the deaf must see it with their eyes half closed. It is there in the touch of a leaf, the texture of a twig, tangible to the most casually inquisitive finger.
The dumb things know it. Woodchucks and coons are raiding the corn fields, the woodchucks adding a final ounce of fat for hibernation, the coons simply feasting. Gray squirrels rattle the leaves in the hickories as they take their share of the crop. Chipmunks gather grass and thistledown to line their nests for Winter. Migrant birds have already moved south.
The precise moment is unimportant. It is only a matter of mathematics relating to the orbit and inclination of the earth. The obvious truth is that Summer is past. The season merges with Autumn. The winesap reddens on the bough. The cricket chirps in the corner. The equinox is only a confirmation.
There is prejudice among weathermen about speaking of storms that come at this time of year as equinoctial storms. Their reasoning is simple. The equinox is a matter of astronomical movements, the relative positions of sun and earth. Storms are a result of atmospheric conditions, not of astronomical relationships. Therefore, there are no equinoctial storms.
That, to me, is hair-splitting. The same reasoning would rule out Spring rains and Winter blizzards. I don’t see how one can rule out the adjectives. It just happens that weather disturbances are the rule rather than the exception at this time of year. Things are happening in the atmosphere. Summer is ending. Autumn is beginning. Long, hot days are ended in our northern hemisphere. The earth is beginning to cool off, up here. There is a new movement of the air. It also happens that these changes are related to the movement of the sun and the position of the earth, for if the sun were not moving southward, as we say, there would be no such profound changes in the atmosphere.
Those factors which make the equinox also breed the stormy conditions. It is a period of change, and often that change is violent and stormy. At the moment our weather is relatively mild and undisturbed. But hurricanes are breeding in the far reaches of the Atlantic, and a deep low-pressure area is moving in from the northwest. Something is going to happen, and if it’s a storm I shall insist that it can be called an equinoctial storm. Today has been just a bit too calm and mild to last.
A squally, overcast day, weather in the making. The river is restless; it has a freight of leaves shaken down by something more than a hurrying squirrel. But I shall not be kept from work by the weather…
I am convinced that there are no new securities. But as the wheel of time turns we rediscover the old ones. And that reminds me that I planned to secure the loft door at the barn before we had a blow. I found it loose and flapping a week ago but hadn’t time to do more than tie it shut with a strand of binder twine…
Well, I fixed that door. I found an old latch and fastened it on. And high time. The gusts are strengthening and the rain comes down, now, in periodic sheets. Pat, of course, went with me and he, too, got drenched. I have changed into dry clothes, but he shook himself—indoors, of course—and now lies here on my study floor, oozing…
To get back to what I was saying. The wheel of time turns and we…
It is four o’clock of a stormy afternoon. I left the typewriter at a little after ten this morning. A crash sent me out of doors. It was a four-inch limb from the big popple, brittle and unequal to the gusty wind. It came down in the road and I had to move it, or I thought I should. Then I was wet enough to enjoy the storm, so I stayed out, checking the downspouts on the house, making sure the roof at the old chicken house I use as a carpenter shop was not leaking, having a look at the boat and its cover.
It was one of those exciting days, great forces on the loose. Water from the pasture was angling down across the asparagus bed, so I got a spade and opened a trench toward the brook to take the water, banking the asparagus bed with sod to check the erosion there. Then it was lunch time.
We ate in the kitchen. I was too wet to venture anywhere else in the house. After lunch it abated somewhat and Barbara put on boots and a raincoat and came out with me to feel as well as see this weather. We walked in the pasture, avoiding the trees, for the wind is pruning all trees mercilessly today. We watched the pines up on the mountainside, bending low beneath the wind, and marveled at the white birches leaning with the storm. We watched the brook, swollen to great proportions and sweeping out across the pasture in a sheet of water. We watched the river, beaten to a surf and with waves two feet high, whitecaps.
It is now four o’clock and dark as though this were November and an early sunset. The wind still rises. The rain strikes the windows with the sound of sleet. Here is my equinoctial storm!
The storm moaned and slashed most of the night and I expected to waken this morning to a house without electricity. But the power is still on. And the winds have died down, though the rain continues, heavy gray rain from a heavy gray sky. The river has risen at least a foot and there are streams at the roadside. But the barometer, which was falling all yesterday, has begun to rise again. The storm center is past.
I had to go to the village this morning to mail a couple of letters, and the road was littered with debris. At two places large limbs had come down, but they had been hauled to the roadside and the way cleared. Charley must have done that; I saw him pass in his truck this morning, going toward the village. His was the only vehicle on the road.
We did Fall chores today, straightening the clutter in the attic for storage of Summer clothes, cleaning the cellar and putting last year’s leftover canned goods in front on the shelves, to be used first. Then I took inventory of our office supplies and made a tentative list of replacements, paper, pencils, carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, filing folders, manuscript envelopes. Two things give me a sense of affluence—a full pantry and a well-stocked supply cabinet.
This evening the rain begins to slacken. The storm should be over by tomorrow.
A clear sky this morning, clean, washed and shining. But I distrust it. We could have frost tonight, brought by the cold air mass which followed the humid warm front that generated our storm. So we cleaned out the garden. In came the last of the peppers, the tiny eggplant, carrots to go into the refrigerator, heads of lettuce. Butternut and acorn squash were picked and stowed. When that was done there wasn’t much else to do; we had harvested more closely than we realized in the past few weeks.
The garden looks bare this evening, only the strawberry leaves and the asparagus fern making much of a show. And the kale, of course, which is hardy and as green as in July. I wish we could have harvested the Summer flowers and stowed them for Winter use. But all we do about the flowers is take up the choice gladiola bulbs and a dozen roots of the dwarf dahlias whose colors most please us, and stow them in the attic. One Spring the dahlias, in a bushel basket with peat moss around them, became so impatient that two of them budded and bloomed right there in the attic in April. It didn’t do them a bit of harm, either; when we put them in the ground they grew and blossomed as vigorously as ever.
No frost last night, but it was down in the low 30s. And, for the first time since April, it was quiet. The katydids were silent, too cold to fiddle. The tree crickets didn’t make a sound. The frogs kept their own counsel. The darkness that only a few weeks ago quivered and hummed and vibrated with a thousand insects was almost palpably silent. I could hear the whisper of leaves brushing against one another.
But it is only a temporary quiet. Warm days and temperate nights will follow this first chill, and even after the first hard frost there will be mild days that turn into Indian Summer. And the night singers will be out again, fiddling desperately. Now they have merely crawled into a crevice or under a leaf. But their energies wane.
I went out to the garden this morning and saw how low
the insect fires of life burn. Black crickets barely moved, even when prodded. Ants made slow progress, their legs stiff as with rheumatism. I found a grasshopper that could crawl but couldn’t manage one leap. By this afternoon the sun had warmed the insects and life surged again, leaping and flying and agile once more.
The sun itself is life to the insect world and the temperature is of less importance, fundamentally, than the duration of sunlight. Days shorten. The sun moves south, as we say. And with that movement, the insect clock begins to run down. Even a week of 80-degree temperature couldn’t really revive it now. The insects near the end of their days.
We have had our killing frost, which blackened the last leaves on the tomato vines, left the zinnias limp, and scorched the marigolds. I went out to cut the frosted flowers and clean the flower garden, and the late phlox and the petunias are more beautiful than ever. So is the late-blooming delphinium.
The leaves have all fallen from the slim young ash trees that border the middle pasture. The dogwoods are at their height of color, one of the finest reds in the spectrum; we have few dogwoods, but there is a scattering of them in the hills nearby. Our big maples along the river are all yellow and the dazzle of their leaves in the early sun is unbelievable. Pure gold. The giant poplar has turned gold, too, but a brassier gold, the gold of cottonwoods I used to know. The gray birches up at the edge of the pines are still another yellow, with a touch of bronze, a yellower yellow than the leaves of the white birch.
I went up to the big clump of white birch, the one with seven big boles, this afternoon to look at the fox grapes which twine there. They are dead ripe. I picked all I could reach, about a gallon, and we shall make a few glasses of fox-grape jelly. The grape leaves are falling from the stems and have a texture almost exactly like that of a paper napkin. The stems will remain on the vines a little longer; then they, too, will be shed.
Autumn is flowing past my door just now, in the river. Red maple leaves are there, and crisp poplar leaves, and the slim yellow leaves from the willows. The poplar leaves are golden galleons, prows high, gusted across the current, beached by an eddy. Milkweed floss dances over the slow stream, bouncing from its surface, too light to be caught until it has traveled a mile or more on the slight breeze that flows close to the water’s surface. Even thistledown, set loose by some energetic goldfinch somewhere upstream, floats in the light drift of air over the water, shimmery gauze that will be borne to some new seed ground. Pokeberries, ink-black, and purple viburnums and the gray berries of red-osier dogwood drift past on broken stems.
Autumn takes firmer hold on the higher hills upstream and comes floating down to where I wait. Autumn gathers strength to take over the whole long valley, and now I see its outriders, its advance guard, on the waters that flow past my door.
A sunny day, almost mild, and we have been patching roofs. A windstorm a month ago took a large patch of roofing paper off the corn crib and another off the big chicken house which I use for a workshop, and on mild days I have been too busy and on idle days it has been too cold to replace that roofing, which cracks unless it is laid under a warm sun. But repairs can’t wait forever.
Charley, who is going to use the corn crib this year, came down with a roll of new roofing paper. I went out to help, since it’s my crib. We laid the roofing, nailed it down, got the joints properly cemented, and paused for a smoke. Charley said, “I’ve got another hour or two. Why don’t we get at that chicken house?”
So we did. And when we had both patches finished we sat in the sun and talked, the slow talk about weather and feed and prices and the year ahead. At last Charley looked at his watch and said, “The cows’ll be expecting me,” and he got up to go.
I said, “Thanks for helping with the chicken house.”
“I didn’t have anything pressing,” he said. And I knew he felt satisfied at having helped. He felt square with me and the world, which is an important feeling for any man. He had paid me back for helping with the crib, which is his responsibility in our simple arrangement. We call it friendship and neighborliness, in an offhand way of speaking, but down inside it amounts to keeping square with yourself.
Thus ends September, in a perfect day. Tonight a few katydids are calling, and a few crickets. I have looked up a formula sent to me for calculating the temperature by timing cricket and katydid calls.
For crickets you count the number of chirps in one minute, divide by four, add forty to the quotient, and you have the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. It is even simpler to count the number of chirps in fifteen seconds and add forty. That should be the temperature.
For katydids, count the number of complete stridulations in one minute. That is, when the insect has made a full “Katy did” call, that is one complete stridulation. Count the complete calls for one minute, subtract nineteen, divide the difference by three, and add the quotient to sixty. The result should be the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. Again, one can get the same result, approximately, by counting the number of calls in twenty seconds and adding fifty-four. And because the katydid’s day and night calls are quite different, this method of estimating temperature is good only for the rate of night calls.
I timed the loudest katydid this evening. The average of three separate timings was eight calls in twenty seconds. Eight added to fifty-four makes sixty-two. My thermometer showed the temperature to be sixty-four at the time. It probably was two or three degrees cooler where the katydid was sitting than it was on my porch.
OCTOBER
IF I WERE TO undertake a new mythology, October would be my god of travel, for now come perfect days to get out and wander the hills and valleys of these latitudes. The scene changes day to day, as though all the colors of the spectrum were being spilled across the landscape—radiant blue of lakes and ponds, green in every tone of the conifers and even among the reluctant oaks, yellows verging from sun shimmer to moon orange in the elms, the beeches, the hard maples, and reds that range to purplish browns, sumac and dogwood and swamp maple and sassafras and viburnum.
October is colorful, exuberant, full of lively spirit. Spring fever can’t hold a candle to October fever when it comes to inner restlessness. The birds are on the wing, the leaves are footloose and eager for a breeze, the horizon is a challenge that amounts to an insidious summons. If I listen closely I can hear October whistling a soft melody as old as Autumn on this earth, and as insistent in its call to go.
This now come to fulfillment. It must have been at this season that man first discovered the potentialities of a ripe grape, for grape juice and cider have begun to potentiate.
Spring was all eagerness. Summer was hot laziness or sweaty haste. But Autumn is achievement and a measure of contentment. Hills wait for climbing. Woods are full of wine and gold. Answers to half-asked questions lie in the thin mist on the horizon. In Spring the impulse is to lie and wait for the answers to come. Now one must go and find the answers.
A migrant farmhand to whom I once gave a hitchhike lift summed it up. “Every Summer,” he said, “I decide to pick one place and settle down. Then it comes Fall, and I just can’t seem to stay put. If Fall would just skip a year maybe I could make up my mind and keep it made. But Fall never skips.”
There’s a scientific explanation of the coloring of the leaves which deals in terms of chemistry as well as botany. Frost has nothing to do with it, of course; it’s a matter of oxidation, of pigmentation, of chemical change, not entirely unrelated to the way the human skin tans or freckles. That’s all very well to know. But there’s also a rule of tongue, as one might say, which may be worth knowing. This rule says that the most colorful leaves appear on trees and bushes with sugar in their sap or tannin in their make-up.
The maples, most vivid of all, are the sweetest when the sap is running. Sweet gum, which has a sweet juice in midsummer, runs the maple a close second. Sour gum, which some call tupelo, has a sweet tang to its sap and a rainbow of color in its leaves. Sassafras, which has sweetness as well as an old familiar f
lavor, splashes the woods with variegated Autumn finery. The oaks, traditional source of tannin, are the bearers of the strongest reds and the deepest purples. Sumac, also well endowed with tannin, has its own colorful glory. And fruit trees, which have a special sweetness of sap, run to colorful leaves.
Go down the list and test them with the tongue and eye, season by season. If the sap is sweet the leaves will tend to gold and crimson; if the sap is pungent and full of the taste of tannin the leaves will show deep red and purple.
Everybody should own a tree at this time of year. Or a valley full of trees, or a whole hillside. Not legally, in the formal “Know all men” way, written on a piece of paper, but in the way that one comes to own a tree by seeing it at the turn of the road, or down the street, or in a park, and watching it day after day and seeing color come to its leaves. That way it is your tree forever, any time you choose to pass that way, and neither fence nor title can take it from you.
I once owned a red maple that way. It stood at the turn of a road I drove along every day, and it was a tree of wonder, for it turned red and gold each year in a different combination. And once I owned a clump of flowering dogwood at the roadside. I watched it bloom in the Spring and grow through the Summer and deck itself with lacquered berries in September and turn wonderfully crimson in October. I own a whole valley in the Rockies, a valley full of quaking aspens, which I have seen slim and white of bole in Winter, and laced with green in Spring, and like a flow of molten gold down the mountainside in October.
I have come to own a row of maples along the river here, where I have sat in their June shade and watched them shed their seed, and seen their stark reality in leafless Winter. Now I revel in their gold, which is like sunlight even on an overcast day, and before long I shall scuffle in their leaves and own them that way. My ownership is beyond legal title. Others may own them too. Trees are anyone’s for the finding, to own forever.