Holding On

Fall has arrived. It rode in on a heavy rain that pulled down twigs and leaves, littering the road with summer's excess. 

Truth to tell, the trees are tired. They have been hanging on to their foliage throughout this hot, dry summer. They're looking for an excuse to lay down their load. A heavy rain will do it, so will a brisk wind. 

They're preparing for the great un-leaving, still weeks away, but imminent. The equinox is here, and with it a lowering of the light. I want to hold onto as much of the light as I can. Don't we all?

The Bird and the Bee

'Tis the season of stoking up, and the local hummingbirds are doing just that. They're hanging out near the feeders, sipping nectar and scaring off interlopers. 

Yesterday, I watched as an especially feisty bird sparred with a bee! Yes, a bee. Not a large bumblebee or wood bee, but a modestly-sized honeybee. 

The honeybee was stoking up too, you see, and this did not sit well with the hummingbird, who became increasingly territorial. 

At one point, it looked more like the bee was chasing the bird than the other way around. I wish I could have snapped a photograph of their aerial displays, but these are quicksilver creatures, best observed and admired from afar. So instead I'll trot out one of the few decent photos I've ever taken of a hummingbird. It will have to do.

Reaching Maturity

Summer has hit its pinnacle. We have almost as much ahead of us as we've left behind. If we fudge it a little we can still call this mid-July. 

Which is all to say that the season has reached maturity. Greens couldn't be greener.  Fledgling cardinals are coming into their own, flitting around with resolve, no longer with the wobbly flight of juveniles. 

And the cicadas! Their calls are the soundtrack of the season, wafting over me in waves. I omit earphones on my morning walks, the better to hear the summer bugs. 

Always I think: Let this last. 

Happy Early Solstice!

Today at 4:51 p.m., the northern hemisphere of our planet officially enters its hottest season. It's the earliest solstice in 228 years, they're saying, since George Washington was president.

I've been thinking of George Washington lately, what with the discovery of 35 bottles of preserved cherries recently found at his home, Mount Vernon. Now I'll think of him again, enjoying the longest day of the year, perhaps in Philadelphia, then the capital of these United States. A few months later, he will deliver his farewell address. 

But back to the solstice, which is early this year because of leap year and our imperfect calendar. I could have waited one more day for it — savored the anticipation — but there's no way to stop a celestial body when it has made up its mind. 

And so I prepare to drain as much daylight and happiness from this day as I can. It's the longest one; it can spare it. 

(A favorite sunrise shot, the beach at Chincoteague, April 2016.)

Suddenly Summer

We've gone from cool and rainy to humid and hot. Suddenly it is summer in Virginia. I don't mind. I love heat and humidity. But the body struggles to adjust. 

Yesterday I walked in the late afternoon, and my feet were dragging. Today I left early, strolling through the last vestiges of pre-dawn coolness that were lingering in the shady spots of my route. 

Back home now I can feel the heat starting to bear down. But the dappled shade of deck and yard promise several hours of al fresco pleasure. 

Long River

This morning I'm thinking of friendship, especially friendship of long standing. People who go back years and how much they become a part of your life. 

I had time to contemplate this on the drive home yesterday, which was up into the mountains where it barely looked like spring, then down into the alleys where spring is in full flower.

Longtime friendship is like that, too, seasons and altitudes, peaks and valleys. Through them all, a long river of connection. 

The Bluebell Trail

The Kwanzan cherries are spreading their heavy arms, wowing us, as they always do, with their big-fisted blossoms. Dogwood are playing it closer to the vest, but they're almost peak bloom, too. 

I worried I'd missed the Virginia bluebells, but yesterday I scooted out for a late-morning hike on the Bluebell Trail that runs along the Potomac River. The flowers were primo, scattered fetchingly among the phlox and ferns with the river roaring in the distance. 

Moving through springtime beauty is one of the best ways to ingest it, to make it stick. Which is what I want to do now, to inhale the loveliness, to claim it as my own. But that, as we know, is not possible. Walking through and past the flowers reminds me that they, like all of us, are present only a short while. We make time to see them when they're here — and then let them go.

Peep Peep!

This photo may feature baby chicks, but the peeps I'm thinking about come from small frogs, spring peepers.

The racket comes from males trying to attract females (which accounts for much of the racket in the animal world this time of year), and it can grow quite loud along a path I walk that edges a wetland. 

I was glad to hear it yesterday, though. I'd been listening for spring peepers since I arrived home but had missed the distinctive, high-pitched sound. 

Now the little critters have spoken: spring is here to stay. 

Springtime in Lisbon

Springtime in Lisbon, or at least the first few hours of it: Trees leafing...

Pigeons begging...

Tourists trollying.

The city shaking off its winter coat and slipping into something more comfortable.

Spring Cleaning

I never put the garden to bed last fall, so last weekend I opened the chickenwire enclosure used to keep the deer at bay and waded into the tangle of old growth. There were the tall stalks of zinnias and dried coneflower heads. There were the long stems of Siberian iris and the hollow-core canes of day lilies. 

This can be a melancholy task to perform in autumn, less a harvest than a confiscation. But done in late winter, when green shoots are already pushing up from the soil, it's a hopeful and much-needed clearing, a spring cleaning. 

As I pulled and tugged and gathered, a familiar scent tickled my nostrils. It was mint: the plant is already growing. I picked a few tiny sprigs to have in my iced tea.

Can summer be far behind?

(The garden in early July.)

Double Digits

January takes its time. It does not rush. It dawdles. It sashays down the runway of months with all the model moves. The turn, the pivot, the pout, the graceful sweep. 

I don't want to be rude, but get moving, Jan. We know your power — your winds, rain, snow and cold. We know what you can do. We know you have the days to do it in, too: a full complement of 31.At least we're in the double digits now.

In my house the Christmas tree has come down, the decorations are boxed and shelved, the living room corner is dark and boring. 

Spring has been known to peek around the edges of February, but there's one long month in its way. A month that feels like it should already be over. I'm talking about you, Jan.

Post Solstice

The shortest day was mostly cloudy. I took two walks, my first in a while. It felt good to be striding through space, cold enough that I wore gloves in the beginning. 

We've made it past the nadir and are now on the ascendancy. There's a direct line from today to June's long, lingering twilights. A fact to keep in mind during the early sunsets of January and February. 

Yesterday afternoon, I heard a springlike twittering in the air. It was a flock of robins who breezed in to hunt for worms and berries. Another sign that spring is out there somewhere. 

Darkness to Light

At 6:45 there is barely any light in the sky. Holiday displays mark the boundaries of street and yard. Our beacon, as they’re intended to be. As for other illumination, it’s still scarce. How easy it is this time of year to think that darkness is winning.

I look out my office window, can barely make out each tree trunk. But the longer I stare, the more individual limbs and branches begin to show themselves, a filigree of darkness against the lightening clouds. The sky is a blotter sopping up the light. Darkness still reigns on ground level; nothing distinct down there yet. No trampoline, garden bench or witch hazel tree. All of that is out of sight, a void. Instead, my eyes are drawn toward the sky, and toward a faint blush of pink gathering around the tree line.

My window faces south, so the big show is out of sight, to my left. I walk into the other room, peer out the window. Dawn barely underway. A smudge of red on the horizon. But walking back in here just 15 minutes later, what a change. Now I see the covered garden bench, the limbs of the witch hazel tree, the white husks of the shells bordering its garden, the azalea and its entourage. The border of leaves and grass.

By 7:12 it is unqualifiedly morning. What a difference 28 minutes can make.

Weathering

I noticed it on my recent forays in Washington state but I notice it here, too:  the beauty abundant this time of year. Though it is the season of diminishment, it's also a season of plentitude, a harvest of fluttering last leaves, a bounty of bare branches.

Leave beauty up to nature, I think, conveniently skipping tornadoes, wildfires and other natural disasters. Nature knows what to take and what to leave behind. It is seldom gaudy or superfluous, always the right amount of color or cover. 

There is a subtle reassurance this time of year. It speaks of weathering, of seeking splendor in the frail and fallen, of finding enough in what is left behind.

Stan's Side

For the last few days I've been getting to know an old friend, Standard — Stan for short.

I haven't seen him since March, but here he is again, and up to his usual tricks: early mornings, early evenings, a sense that darkness is winning. In a way, it's not his fault. He arrives on the scene just as the light is fading, and departs when it's coming into its own. He's left holding the bag.

Some people want to banish him forever. Others think we should get rid of his flashy cousin. Until we do one or the other, Stan will be the sober fellow who says "you really should go home now, it's getting dark" or "early to bed and early to rise." 

If you happen to catch him in the morning, though ... it's a different story. Trust me, I know.  

(Two sunrise photos in a row? Stan made me do it.)

Super Scary!

Ghosty has been with us for years, a piece of fabric with a stuffed-newspaper head and inexpertly-drawn eyes. He's been haunting our lamp post for the better part of two decades, and when I at first couldn't find him in the basement a week ago, I felt bereft.

Compare him with the current crop of Halloween decorations. The 12-foot-tall Skelly, for instance, a plastic skeleton so popular that Home Depot can't keep it in stock. Or the gruesome, leering werewolf that rears his ugly head from a woods near me. I wouldn't want to run into him on a dark night.

It's all fun and games — unless you're a child with an overactive imagination. Since I was one of those, I feel for the kiddos who see a masked face so scary that a full year later they can't forget about it.

It's super-sized Halloween terror, coming soon (already!) to a suburban lawn near you.

(Top photo: courtesy Home Depot)

Autumn Afternoon

A late walk through the woods, along the lake, over the bridge, and back to where I started from.

No question what time of year it is. If the leaves didn't clue me in ...

the peg-legged skeleton pirate did. 

But there are still patches of green, remnants of summer left behind. 

Shoulder Seasons

What is it about shoulder seasons? Are spring and fall truly more poetic or do they just seem that way? 

"Margaret are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?" wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem "Spring and Fall to a Young Child."

Autumn and spring are times of great beauty, times when it's easier to notice the underpinnings of things: the uncoiling of a fern, the thinning of leaves. 

I wonder, too, if spring and fall aren't times of greater yearning, when we see outside our small worlds to what lies beyond. 

Author Susan Cain would call these seasons bittersweet, "a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world." 

A Reckoning

The furnace came on this morning. I smelled the heat before I felt it, slightly acrid but warm and comforting, too. The aroma of thick bathrobes and steaming kettles and stepping inside from a cold rain. 

We could have held out longer, but why? It's inevitable. The cold is coming. Toughing it out won't keep it away. 

As befits a day of forced air heat, clouds dominate, and the stillness they bring is welcome. They promise seclusion and concentration and a long writing session. They promise cold, too. 

Backward Glance

I know people who extol the beauties of fall — the color, the crispness, the end of humidity — but I'm not one of them. To me there's always a backward glance at this time of year.

I don't mind the heat, I relish cicada song, and I love the long days that summer brings.

So on the last day of this summer, I'm reveling in the sun that's trying to peak through the ever-thickening cloud cover, and I'm savoring the adventures — from Seattle to Scotland and all the places in between.