Autumn Equinox

The wind blows in bursts all day while we sit on the top of this incoming nor’easter. The leaves fall from the trees in dreamy technicolor waves, threatening a lackluster leaf peeping season for the tour buses up the notch. They fall now – just for me. The gray dome sky ensconces the earth, the swirling tree tops try to tear it open, the gusty tapestry of leaves wave in defeat. My eyes wide and my ears open – but for the wind, the silence is deafening. Something big is out there. It’s coming this way. The swirling storm energy makes me want to duck from the monsters in Stephen King’s The Mist – tentacles about to grab us from the unknown world above…. But instead I find myself thinking about Winnie the Pooh, that wise, rotund little sage.

Energy goes where it flows. Pooh leans on some bridge, paws on his cheeks, pudgy little elbows on the railing, watching a sad little stick float by in a river. He finds beauty in the moment. I savor how insignificant we all are. That wind threatens everything we've ever known. It knocks out the power for six hours. We make do with a woodstove and our pens and journals. A nor’easter, you say. Leaf peeping season, you say. Seasons, you say. We harvest everbearing raspberries and wash the squirmy little bugs off the kale, anyway. We hope the cucumbers survive a light frost. I feel pretty wimpy feeling concerned about seventeen cucumbers when I have thousands of calories of lamb on the hoof nibbling the last gasps of grass and beech leaves in the yard. Lambs I need to butcher and process. I lay in bed and imagine how I will put a bullet into each of their skulls next month. I need to buy a gambrel, I remember. I roll over and cuddle my dog. What do normal people think about, I wonder? That wind blows in the mind of the farmer. All day, every day, year round....

Summer has stayed late but autumn is blowing it away. On the equinox we sat by the fire and whittled away the final daylight hour of the longest day left. I literally whittled – a pine branch in my right hand, my dull pocket knife in my left. Will it be a spear? A spoon? Or kindling. There was a subtle melancholy as we awaited the strike of 5:05 pm, the earth’s chosen time for when summer turns to fall on this particular firepit. The pine popped and the smoke curled slowly around the fire, giving everyone a tear or two with its acrid kiss. But to smell like woodsmoke at some late hour when you’re back indoors is its lasting gift, and worth the wince.

We pondered the final moments of an amazing summer : me, Karley, and her oldest, eleven-year-old Nash. The conversation was scattered and ethereal, as they often are when staring into a fire – and with children and adults both speaking different languages at different tones and volumes. Facts, figures, logiclessness, semantics, smirks, spitting smartaleckness and raspberry blowing. But with moments left until our awaited great shift, I interjected into the conversation, holding my watch up like a referee: “Ten seconds ‘til autumn! Take one last deep of summer.” And suddenly there was silence.

Just the quiet inhale of three traveling companions entering a portal. I thought about all the good work we’ve done this summer, and the work to come. Pride and gratitude and exhaustion and peace all passed through me. I felt the switch. I passed through the ‘nox.

Karley and I exhaled and exchanged a quiet smile – and our secret language eyes. Life on the other side. Young Nash held his breath a few seconds longer, finally breathing out a sweetness and a softness and a goodbye to summer we could all feel.

The fire swallowed the entire moment up. We were ready. I tossed my pine whittle stick into the coals.

Let the leaves fall. Let that wind blow.