Deep Autumn

I am a creature of contradictions.

I live for the liminal times, the boundary between day and night, between waking and sleeping, between autumn and winter. I am a night owl, a nocturnal creature, as my mother put it, I "prowl the house at night like a cat."

And yet I suffer in the winter dark and fall into depression and only live again when the light returns. I am the myth of the wheel of the year in human form. Samhain is the end of the old year, Imbolc is the new year, and in between... I am nothing.

Hallowell, Maine. Photo by CarysBirch.

This year I have felt the autumn like no autumn I can remember. The leaves started to change early, toward the end of August. Just a little, here and there, in the swamps first where the trees' roots are exposed to cold water long before the soil-insulated roots of their cousins on dry ground. The first weekend of October was warm and bright, there was barely any color in the trees yet, but the light was deep gold tinged. My other half went camping, it was the last hurrah of summer. I stayed home and cleaned out my gardens; the dark nights came early, and I was nesting for winter.

This year, autumn was a spectacular display of color. We had a long, warm fall, fading into coolness instead of crashing toward frost like we often have in Maine. The oranges were brighter than I can remember any time before. The yellows were clear, lemony, not the gold-brown of other autumns, and they lasted into the beginning of November.

Kennebec River, Photo by CarysBirch,

Now the frosts have arrived, every morning is smoky with ice and the last leaves are clinging to the stubborn oaks, curled and brown. The hills that two weeks past were a postcard perfect blaze of rusty gold are now covered with the smoke-purple haze of the birch branches, interrupted here and there by green-black pine.

November is a dead month, the air smells like the death of the summer. It burns cold in the morning, hard and metallic at the back of my throat. I am dying too. I am not Wiccan, but their story rings true this year. The God is gone from the world and I can feel it.

But in the midst of the death, love is stirring. I am a walking contradiction, I always have been, and I love the winter trees. The daytime sky is bleeding its blue, fading to white, and the branches stand out stark against their canvas. I could stare for hours. I love every line. The naked bodies of trees stir me, as beautiful as dancers, black against the white sky, the gray earth. You can't truly see the trees when they're obscured by foliage. Bark is beautiful. Branch and twig and twisted root.

Image from pixabay.com, public domain image.

I have a whole season to learn the trees, find which stars nestle in their branches at night, trace the outlines of the last clinging leaves, watch the beauty of ice casing branches in the December rain. And at Imbolc the sky will lighten; the blue will start creeping back. The birch branches will turn red at the ends. The season of starkness, bareness, will end. And I will mourn, even as I come alive.

I love what I hate. I live my own death. The world is turning me toward November.