November Blog
What can I say about November that hasn’t been said before? Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness? No, I think that has been said before by someone. No sun, no moon, no morn, no noon, no dawn, no dusk, non proper time of day.? No, that’s been said by someone else, too.
Thing is, November is all those things. It can be deadly, by in the November poem by Thomas Hood. Dull, dreary, devoid of light, depressing and deplete in comfort. Like living in a Tupperware box. (Didn’t Bill Bryson say that in one of his books?). But on one of those autumnal days, when the sun leaks through and the sky allows itself to be blue, it’s beautiful. Keats would certainly approve. If you’re up early enough, and maybe up on the Haldons walking your dog like I sometimes am, you can see the soft mists rising up from the valley, and later, when the day warms up, the air is mellow, golden with colour, rich with the scent - not so much of fruit unless you’re in an orchard - but of dying leaves.
Autumn leaves. Who doesn’t love them? The rich colours. We may not have the redness of the maple like they do in Canada and the Eastboard states but the golden shades of our deciduous trees are lovely. In some ways I think the red Maple is too rich, too vivid, too vibrant. The leaf is dying, after all. Should death shout at you quite so loudly. The golds, the russets, the browns - they have their beauty, too, but they lull you into the dying times more softly. You are calmed by gold, not overstimulated. You are re-by assurred by gold, restituted, redeemed. The leaf eventually turns into a less savoury brown, falls to earth, decomposes to become part of the soil - leaf mould rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, wonderful to nourish new plants.
But by the time that happens, it doesn’t matter. If we’re lucky enough to have had enough of those truly Autumnal days, those days of golden light, we’ve been prepared for it; we’re ready for the shutting down, the darkness of winter.
On a more prosaic note, I’ve ordered another day-light light, so I can starve off my tendency to SAD when the light diminishes, as it does now so noticeably when the clock has gone back an hour.
Reuben doesn’t know the clock has gone back. He’s still waking me up at 7 am. Poor Reuben! He’s been quite discombobulated by the perpetual letting off of fireworks. In the good ole days it went on for one night . . . now it’s interminable. Two weeks of fireworks coming off at all times of the evening, upsetting all the dogs and possibly the cats too, is really too much. There should be a law against it . . .
ps. I’ve always wanted to use the word ‘discombobulated’ in prose. What a delicious word! It rocks around in the mouth.