Changing tunes and times

I missed noting that yesterday was Lughnasadh, the first of two harvest festivals, the second being Alban Elfed (the Autumn Equinox). Today, the first Fall catalog arrived in the mail. I walked down the drive with temperatures in the upper 80’s to collect that mail, so, as usual by this time each Summer, I’m really looking forward to Autumn, even if summer weather haas been cooler and wetter, like this year.

goldenrod blossoms in a field of green grasses

Photo by J. Harrington

There’s a strange mix of blossoms in the yard, with a few lilac blossoms (Spring time) and some goldenrod (Autumn). Many of our lilies have already bloomed and faded. One of these weeks we’ll notice the first hints of leaves changing colors and I’ll start trading short-sleeved, cotton t-shirts for long-sleeved flannel and chamois shirts.

There are several songs that haunt me about this time each year. One is Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game, with its all too true refrain:

And the seasons they go round and round 
And the painted ponies go up and down 
We're captive on the carousel of time 
We can't return we can only look 
Behind from where we came 
And go round and round and round 
In the circle game

In my mind that song complements her Autumn focused Urge for Going and the chorus lines:

I get the urge for going

When the meadow grass is turning brown

And summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

The neighbor’s meadow grass hay field has turned brown and is one of the few meadow grass fields in our area not already cut and baled.

We’re at at time when one cycle appears to be nearing completion and a new one is barely emerging. It’s too soon to tell what our next American dream may be, but it’s not likely to be the same as the one we chased after WWII. Infinite growth on a finite planet doesn’t work as well as figuring out how to continually produce better quality lives for the next generations.

Autumn

By Sydney Lea

Why not write something for those

who scratched out improbable livings here?

Someone has managed to sow

This broken field with stones, it appears,

 

So someone’s scratching it still,

Although that Japanese knotweed has edged

The tilth. Two wasps in the child

Attempt to catch sun on a rail of the bridge.

 

The old local doctor has passed

At almost a full decade past ninety.

He never seemed depressed.

Seventy now, if barely,

 

I consider the field again:

Someone will drag these rocks away

But they’ll be back. The air smells like rain,

Which is fine, the summer’s been much too dry.

 

Nothing is left of the barn

But some rusty steel straps in some nasty red osier.

The stone fence still looks sound,

But even there the knotweed steps over.

 

Hadn’t I pledged an elegy

To the old ones who worked here? You couldn’t claim

They thrived, exactly, but maybe

They likewise scented good wind full of rain,

 

Lifted eyes above this old orchard

To the cloud-darkened hills and found their support

Somehow, somewhere. No matter,

They kept going until they could go no more.

 

The trees’ puckered apples have gathered

A flock of birds, and as they alight,

They’re full of unseasonable chatter,

As if to say that all will be right.

 

The old ones I promised a poem

Must have said it too. It’ll be all right.

I never knew them. They’re gone.

I say it out loud, It’ll be all right.

 

 

—Caledonia County, Vermont

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