The Short Sobs of the Violins of Autumn

The violins of autumn don't get much of a solo around here. More like a two-bar bridge and then it's off to the drizzling continuo of winter rain. "Fall color" lasts from about 2:45 to 4:50 on November 1 every year; after that the rains knock all the bright leaves down to where they form a glutineous mass in every catchbasin and a slimy coating on level ground.

I still love the autumn. But the Northwest version isn't the sort of thing that inspires poets and balladeers. It's just the introduction to the Dark Ages of winter, and much as we try and enjoy it the pleasure is fleeting.

The winds of autumn

Last night the wind blew in.

Sometimes in the last of summer or the earliest months of autumn we get an odd sort of east wind. The winter winds that blow off the interior are frightful and frigid; they usually meet our Pacific rain in a head-on collision of ice and snow, plunging the Portland region into a Dantesque Hell of fearsome roads and fearful drivers.

These are not those winds.

Instead, the late-summer winds clear out the skies and crispen the air. Temperatures drop into the pleasant seventies, the nights are sleep-cool and the days brisk and autumnal. Moribund leaves, already drying and turning, pile in drifts along fences and at the base of walls. Crows scud overhead in playful bands trying tricks that only the strong winds allow them.

We don't enjoy the autumn wind every year, so it was with a deep, slow satisfaction that I roused in the night last night to hear the soughing of the trees above the roof and the faint singing of the street-wires that announced the arrival of our occasional visitor from the East.

This morning was everything that a wind-morning should be; crackling with cold, bright and vivid, the gustlets whisking the steam from my coffee cup as I stood in the long shadows anticipating the arrival of the day.

The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love.

~ Deborah Digges

Winter is Coming

The rains have settled in, and the morning chill is thick with the dank reek of wet leaves.

Autumn is here, and winter is coming.

(h/t to the incredibly gifted Amy Mebberson and her adorable Pocket Princesses for the cartoon)

Beginning Autumn

On the porch in September a brown spider
in its web. There are deaths that come so quietly.

Over the mountains, the half moon rising.
Behind the fence a neighbor's dog howls in the dark.

No matter what the poet says a yellow leaf
asks nothing. The green wail of spring is what I want.

When you follow the shoreline out of sight,
I listen to ocean in an empty shell.

I never intended my life to turn out this way.
How solitary the drifting boat on the water.

~ Jeanne Lohmann

The summer is winding to a close here in the Northwest. The tomatoes are still proffering their August bounty but the red harvest is dew-frosted in the mornings now, and the fat heirlooms are cracking in the cool nights. The grass is still sere but the green is creeping back in after the first of the autumn rains.

The pictures of the back of the house are testimony to my irritating parsimony. Despite the repeated warnings that "replacing gutters is often difficult and a professional roofer may be a long-term savings" I went ahead with replacing Missy's back roof gutter, and a nasty, unpleasant job it was. I can see a visible belly in the damn thing, and the brackets I used did not do a particularly adequate job of holding the inside of the gutter against the roofline, so I had to go back and hang some flashing to route the runoff into the gutter. It's the worst sort of jury-rigging, but it works, and as my old drill sergeant was wont to say; if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid...

I hope you are starting to see the signs of autumn, despite the poet's wail for spring, it is my favorite season of the year.

Last Summer Days

Gorgeous Indian-summer day in Portland; I had work up in the far northeast of Vancouver, Washington, monitoring infiltration tests though the lazy, sunny afternoon. Cool enough for crispness - the meadowgrass was white with frost when I arrived in the predawn - but warming to pleasantly shirtsleeve temperatures by afternoon. A light wind from the south bringing on it the dry tartness of fallen leaves, the sultry scent of woodsmoke, and the high, clear iciness of the late October sky.

It gave me time to sit on my tailgate, book neglected at my side, and just enjoy the beauty of the last of summer and the brief, bright autumn we pass through so quickly before the gray rains of winter begin.

XXXIX

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

~A.E. Housman (Last Poems)

Summer's End

The cool mornings and slanting light of evening are reminding me that our summer is drawing to a close.

Unlike the East Coast, this year Portland's summer has been brief, cool, and drizzly. We've had almost no hundred degree days, few of the brutal dog-mouth days that make you want to set in the shade and do nothing.Now the nights will draw out, and clouds lour in, and the cold rains of autumn begin.

"For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go."

- George Washington Cable

The last sunflowers

I was working my ass off, frankly, and so I didn't get to blog about the game at the Civic Sta - oh, sorry, PGE Park - last Thursday.It was a terrific game; scoreless until the 83rd minute when Ryan Pore dove to meet terrific service from Doug DeMartin and headed it past the Puerto Rico keeper, the Boys made the goal stand up and the crowd of 15,000-some went home singing and happy.But it was a poignant moment, too, as it was the last game in the old barn for the team that has played there since the first year of this decade. Next year the team will return, but as part of the highest U.S. division, Major League Soccer, and likely with many new names on the back of the jerseys. The players on the field Thursday night, many of them, were there for a reason. Many of them had tried, and failed, at the top flight.In a sweet gesture many of the fans brought sunflowers and their formal dress to celebrate the end of summer, and the end of a meeting of place, people, and deeds we have treasured, both the good and the ill of, and will look back on with the sort of lingering goodwill we hold for things loved and lost, not through tragedy but merely though time and the rise and fall of tide.There will be new joys, and new heartbreaks to come, and we will surely return to the new pitch and cheer the new players. But I didn't want to talk about that. That's for next season, and a new spring, and new hopes and dreams; the perennial hopes and dreams of all players, and all fans, and all people, at the outset of any endeavor.

No, this time I'm just thinking about the last bright golden sunflowers of the summer, and the happy farewell to much that I have loved and will not see again.

September

"I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air."
- Theodore Roethke, The Far Field