'Autumn' Classic

            George Winston is on the Ipod. Naturally. It's autumn.

            Sonya is here for a visit. She is sitting on the couch, relaxing; perhaps lying down. (Let's not tell.) She is reading a book and watching the early sunset through the west-facing windows.

            And also listening to the George Winston recording titled "Autumn."

            We have listened to this music for many years now, at home and on the road. We have driven through the country, up and down mountain roads in the fall of the year, listening to that recording on the car's CD player. We have listened to it at sunset time, or in autumn showers, or when dark clouds and overcast days tell the tender creatures of the world to stand up straight and pay attention. (Or else.)

            We played it when we lived in Plymouth where Sonya and Saul did most of their growing up. We played George Winston albums on vinyl, then on cassette, then on CD; now on the Ipod and the computer. They're a family soundtrack. Not all the albums are about autumn. We played "December," "Winter into Spring," "Summer," "Forest." All are good outdoor music, great seasonal evocations, and memorable theme songs for special places.

            But whenever it happens that we're together at some time or another in the fall of the year, the music of "Autumn" is certain at one moment or another to fill our space. The tracks on the album are named "Colors," "Woods," "Longing," "Moon," "Road," "Sea," and "Stars." Really, what else is there?

            Today, with Sonya here with me in Quincy and Anne at work, the two of us took a Dad-and-Daughter afternoon walk in the Blue Hills Reservation. No need to hurry. No elaborate preparations. Some discussion over whether it was really as warm outdoors as the thermometer said it was, and would it still feel like light sweater weather two hours later. No wind. Clear skies. The air held a summertime ambiance. The living was autumn easy.

            The woods of the Blue Hills proved silent at the mid-afternoon start of our outing. Birds were few, generally high up in the trees. Fugitive silhouettes. Chitter and goodbye. No crows, broadwings, no black shadows gliding above us. The squirrels silent and sated after weeks of rushing around. Acorns beneath our feet and nobody interested.

            Our trail begins off Willard Avenue close to a city neighborhood's houses, apartments and other buildings, a flux of roadways both local and interstate, and not far from one of the poster children for suburban over-development, the South Shore Mall. The report of traffic when you part the curtains of the forest is constant. But a few minutes down the trail and you no longer hear anything of that report, not even the headlines. You strain to pick up the buzz of a plane.

            We talked, passed a few other walkers, their matched labs,and I found myself on a path I did not remember choosing. Oh: here? Something chose it for us. A muddy spot in the center. Wetlands drier than usual in this under-watered autumn. The reflection of the surrounding tree-line in the pond where we cross on a causeway between the St. Moritzes named for the famous Swiss resort lake. The neighborhood once had aspirations.

            November's bare brush and branch, brown foliage,withered wildflowers -- all are brown as earth and wood. Summer's green the victim of last week's below freezing nights. Paths, unmarked, turn off to the west but we do not take them. On the trail's east side the lumbering approach of huge bald mounds of green-topped earth show us the border of Quincy's high-end Granite Links Golf Club, its high manmade fairways built on Big Dig fill.

            We come at last to the warm, winsome quiet day's crown of color. Bright with red berries glowing in the bare and brownish woods, amid so many branches, stalks and trunks (top photo on left). The day leads quietly up to this moment. "Colors."

            When I turn us back, the sun is on my right. I make sure to keep it there all the way back on the accidental trail.

            The birds emerge, a few here and there, and chitter with a carefree imitation of younger seasons.

            We make it back home in time to watch the sunset through the living room windows. The moon will come later; maybe we'll go to the sea to watch it rise. Then the stars. What else to do but fill the house with the pure and melancholy joy of George Winston's "Autumn"?

When the Earth Breathes, We Can

 

    I am trying very hard to like this weather.

            It's the middle of November. My world is getting colder and not for just a couple of days but for an inescapably longer and colder time. It's a trend. And it's going to get worse before it gets better.

            So how do you deal with the chilly side of winter weather?

            You go outdoors.

            And find a truly open space, the more open the better. There is something special about open places. In open country you feel different the moment you step out of the car; or out of the door, if the surroundings are right. 

            People say "smell the fresh air." They say "take a deep breath."

            My theory of this 'fresh-air effect' -- there is always a theory -- is that senses we aren't consciously aware of, that we don't know we have, are perceiving sensory input we can't access with any of the five physical senses we are conscious of using.  

            People know they have to get outdoors. Sometimes we say we "have to get out of the house." Closing the door behind us and stepping into a roofless world is a need we feel but can't easily articulate to ourselves because it doesn't belong to the verbal, logical part of our conscious mind -- what Aristotle called "the rational part of the soul."

            Another part of my theory is that this is why people have dogs.

            Most everyone I saw in my outing the other day at Squantum Point Park (see photos), a strip of flat open space by the water in Quincy, was walking a dog. They were really walking themselves, whether they knew it or not, and letting their dogs come along. This is especially true I suspect in cold weather and even more true in urban or quasi-urban places like Quincy.

            Places with lots of cars, buildings, pavement, impervious surfaces. Too much pavement is hard on the animal within. No smells. (Organic ones, that is.)

            When the earth breathes, we can.

            What your dog can smell outdoors practically drives the animal crazy with stimulation. All that stimulation of deep animal senses teaches birds, squirrels and other members of the "higher animal family" (to which we belong as well) how to be animals; how to live on the earth.

            It's sense data, information. Dogs and other animals, unlike like people, can also smell the time dimension. They know who else has walked on this earth, or smelled this bush (or peed on it), in the past. Humans have lost that ability -- except in rare cases. Insert your own joke here.

            I compare this invisible sense data to the pheromones that draw insects to food sources or potential mates. It's a kind of sense of smell, but not one we possess.

            We don't consciously smell or otherwise sense these stimuli -- the qualities of air, light, layers of the sky, water vapor, the thousands of different sorts of vegetation in the natural environment. We may perceive them, but our minds don't know it. But maybe our bodies know it; perhaps our subconscious absorbs it.

            These un-sensed natural stimuli stimulate us, uplift us, deepen our breathing, clear our head, relax our eyes, gentle our hearing, sharpen our thoughts, and put low-level anxieties back to sleep where they belong. We feel more "alive" as a result.

            So now matter how cold and wintery the weather gets, we need to make an effort to get out of doors and get smacked in the face with more life.

            I don't always like the cold weather, but a part of me loves it.

Following the Moon

            In the first shot of the moon I took this month, our celestial sibling is very, very small. You would not know it's there unless you were the person who saw it in the clear blue autumn sky when you pressed the button. We think of seeing the moon after dark, so it seems rare to us to find a crescent moon in the sky at this time. The waxing (i.e. getting larger) crescent moon, especially in its first days, is the very, very small slice of moon.

            According to a number of cultures it's good luck to see the moon on the very day of a new cycle. The weather must be clear, so maybe that's part of it. In cultures where people lived or spent a great deal of their time out of doors, watching the sky was like keeping up with the news. If you didn't follow the day to day shape of the sky you were not very aware. You might be regarded as out of touch. If you were an observant person, in tune with your environment, who knew where the moon was for its usefulness as both reference in space and time, you had the makings of a good hunter and were likely to be a valuable member of the tribe. You were the kind of person who knew what time of day it was and what time of the month (the date as we would say) because you knew exactly where to look for the moon. This also made it more likely that you would pay your bills on time.

            We don't use the night sky as a clock or a calendar the same way our ancestors did. Urban light pollution blinds us. Weather in a temperate, four-season climate posts other challenges. We can have a rainy period or cloudy week and lose track entirely of the phase of the moon. We can't remember when we've last seen it. Then the sky clears one night, the moon pops out, and we say, 'Wow that big. Amazing, look at that. When did the moon get so big? It's almost full.'

            Actually, of course, the moon is 'moving,' waxing and waning, at the same rate as always. We may be "all over the place," the moon is always in the right place. That is to say, it "appears" to us where it does according to the unbending and ironclad laws of celestial mechanics. Which remind me to explain at some other time.

            As best as I can remember, the motions of the moon can best be explained by a couple of oranges and a flashlight. Though what the oranges have to do with the moon I'm sure I don't know, since the leading theory of its nature traditionally inclined toward green cheese.

            Still, some of us, even in rainy, cloudy, changeable places with shopping centers, superhighways, tall buildings and airports swallowing huge hunks of the night, still like to know, and keep track of, where the moon is. In an informal, casual, approximate sort of way. If asked, we wave at some quadrant of the sky and say 'I think the moon is over there somewhere.' Clouds may be blocking our view. Or a building, or a rise in the land. Or it might be that the moon is already too low in the sky to appear over the lines of houses always separating one's vantage from the horizon. Or it may not have risen yet, or already set. So even though the moon is not visible right now in whatever phase may prove to be the current one, it may very well be 'over there somewhere.' It's just that we can't see it.

            Still, we try.

            When I next took the moon's photo earlier this month, just a few days beyond my first effort, it was already considerably more substantial. Particularly in those first few days the moon is like an infant gaining a great deal of mass and weight and changing a lot in its first year of life. Our newborn moon.
            Last month, or maybe the month before, or maybe both (it's hard to keep track these days even when we try), we made a point of taking our exercise walks along the shoreline in Quincy and timing them to the rising of the full moon over the water. Or, actually, over a hunk of peninsula like an arm stretched out into Boston Harbor. So, actually, it was rising over mostly water, and leaving a brilliant reflection when the sky was clear on the flat bay water between it and us. Those were very fine moon sightings.

            Since then, things have happened. It's gotten unaccountably dark a lot earlier -- moving the clocks had something to do with that. The moon is keeping the same time, it's just that we've changed ours. It's also gotten a lot colder; we'll blame the sun for that.

            But I can't wait, even if we don't walk along the shore very much this month, for the moon to get big and full, and then to see if I can guess when it will rise over Quincy Bay and we can see its reflection on the water. I know this will happen.

            Just don't ask me when.

The Garden of the Skies

          

 

  Look up. At the urban oasis of the trees.

            In Eastern Massachusetts November is the month when the streets of the old cities, and in the old residential sections of villages, towns and human settlements everywhere, display their peak performance as occasions of beauty.

            Look up when you walk down the street. It's not the same old street as you think it is. None of the streets are the same as they were a week ago, or even a couple of days ago.

            In our neighborhood people pass blindly by, stalking to the subway or broadcasting their thoughts in those one-way conversations so puzzling to the rest of us. What's that noise? Oh, she-he is on the phone declaiming in a voice to silence the crows and put the hastening squirrels to shame. Just as if he-she is the only person in the world and maybe that's the case are because I don't see anybody else gathering outdoors to celebrate the Time of the Trees.

            You don't have to visit the nation's capital at cherry blossom time or to Vermont, New Hampshire or the Berkshires in October to delight in trees.You can stay home to see the full expression of autumn's beauty, but you do have to open your eyes.

            Look up. The Garden of the Skies is in flower.

            In Eastern Massachusetts this autumn peak comes later than in the postcard regions mentioned above. But it doesn't get any better than here and now in what is sometimes referred to as the "urban forest." That's a telling phrase, I thought, when I first heard it. I still do.

            So step outdoors and find a street (perhaps your own) where traffic varies from light to nonexistent. In old neighborhoods like ours whole quadrants of hours go by without sight or sound of a moving vehicle. Sometimes, when the leaf blowers are still and the walking talkers absent, it's just plain quiet on our "city" streets. Pick your moment and look up at the foliage. The color, shadings, combinations, textures and most of all the pure abundance of the wild forest are here as well. Sometimes with greater variety. Some elms, for instance, survive in the urban forest. The tree the city planted a few years in front of our house is a Chinese elm. It's thriving.

            The maples, perhaps the species with the greatest number of varieties planted in cities and towns, generally hold off until this month before changing colors. Though in the streets of the urban forest as elsewhere the old trees are the most majestic, they don't have to be very old before they are beautiful. (Like people?) Long lines of twenty-something maples make a golden arcade -- exactly the way a king or noble, or oligarch, would have planted his favorite trees along the thoroughfare leading to his mansion. We have them along the curb. They glow like a happy regiment, a family.

            What George Washington literally could not wait to plant in his famous Mount Vernon estate were the many varieties of native American trees, the same beautiful trees we have planted along the streets of out cities and towns. (He so couldn't wait that when he left the army for home after the long years of the Revolution, he rushed the season, planting in January and losing may of his saplings to winter storms.)

            If you're willing to open your eyes to the natural world in the midst of the man-made one, you'll see that many of those native American varieties are still with us; some of our trees are old, some very old, some young but already spreading their canopy. They are a monument to one of humankind's and nature's most successful collaborations. And they are never more beautiful than right now.

            Look up to the foliage against the deep-blue autumn sky! There's your November garden.