10.20.16

As we move through week two of this “train of moisture”, even NOAA is getting dramatic: “This persistently wet pattern is profound for what is typically the driest month of the year.”  It’s true.  The Sno-Tel site on top our nearest mountain records seven inches more moisture than on this date last year.  It comes in bands and plumes of rain, broken up by sparkling sunshine.  Walking at the head of the lake yesterday afternoon, I took my camera, just in case, keeping it tucked inside my raincoat.  And, when the clouds parted for awhile, there was the best of October, in all her golden glory.

This is my favorite time of Autumn, when the leaves have reached their apex of color, and begin to carpet the ground.  I love their twirl in the air as they drift down.  They have done their job so completely and thoroughly; starting out as tiny reddish buds that burst open to young green, changing over to a mature deep green at the height of summer, and, then, finishing their lives in a blaze of red and gold.  With a stack of interesting new books,  waiting to be opened by my fireside chair, I keep coming back to Henry Beston who tells us how to think about this “incomparable pageant.”

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod