Now that the cold has wrapped itself around the landscape again, I am coming alive once more, starting with keener vision, noting the ebbing, monochromatic hues of the forest at dawn and the velvet dark at midnight.

I wake in the morning after the predicted first frost, not knowing what the record-keepers of the weather have found, and not caring. For today, I have warmth enough from the kerosene heater in the little cabin to make my small pyramid house seem as certain of rising temperatures as the first skunk cabbage poking its head above the ground in spring.

Here in our dwelling, the dog has faith that I will provide, and I trust nature’s repetitions, the cycles of life in the temperate zone.

I know I will have to get wood in for the stove, most likely today and most probably not at the best possible price. But the wood stove hasn’t actually arrived here yet or been installed, and the idea of buying and stacking in anticipation of stoking that might not be possible yet seems a risky investment of time and a waste of energy.

But the pot-belly will arrive over the weekend or shortly after, and by next week, I suppose, I will be hauling armloads of wood like a front-loader. I will play the old fall game, trying to fashion a kind of firewood jigsaw to get the pile stacked just right under the lean-to so that the stack will not, one frigid winter morning, go avalanche on me in a torrent of rolling wood.

But mornings now there is not much to do but love the life I live. I awaken early, put water on for coffee, tell myself stories of how the day will unfold, while little pieces of it are drifting down like confetti, ahead of me, the early autumn leaves making their descent to the deck. The edges of the birch’s discards are tinged with red, and every leaf gone to ground is exposed to my attention, each frond and factory of sugar production out there a work of art that my mind records in here, as though in a freeze frame of a camera.

The silence reacquaints itself with my space in the scheme of things, reminding me that it is not still, even though it settles me, that it is not calm, though it stops my heated activity. The quiet here in the woods is something like a coverlet, not of comfort or even of the coming harvest that is the herald of death. All things still living at this time of year remain intent on survival to the bitter end – even if it means a beetle burrowing into bark, a bear hibernating in a cave or fish and frogs drowsing, matching their metabolism to the sluggish conditions in the mud of a cold pond growing colder. Slowing down does not for a second suggest stopping; it is simply the next step in the long circle walked by all the creatures of the Earth.

The crows keep busy on the back roads, taking a tally of last night’s road kill, filling their bellies with the game cut down overnight by humans’ hurtling boxes of steel and light, slicing through the dark. The Canada geese drift across the sky like tattered ribbons floating in the breeze, letting instinct and wind carry them to wintering grounds far south. They are one of the more familiar banners of fall, fluttering and following the light, the warmth, the dictates of eons of evolution.

They know when to move; they fly without understanding, sensing without thought all that preoccupies me day to day: time and rest, movement and commitment to arrive at the appointed hour. I envy the automatic pilot of their urges, their wings, how they pull the future forward, toward them, while the season rolls itself up, below, in baled hay in the fields, in the grasshoppers and crickets, wheedling their way into the garage or the basement, finding the little cracks in my carefully constructed shelter against the cold.

We are all hunkering down together, huddling in the few dwellings that autumn leaves untouched enough to offer protection or a buffer against the cold. I will sweep the grasshopper and the cricket back outdoors this afternoon, while the sun still shines like summer, whisper to them that they may scuttle into the shed or wend their way amid the split logs to make one more transitory home during our ephemeral stay here, amid the boulders and the birch, between heaven and Earth.

Home is closer than we think, a stop along the way where we find ourselves happy – and held by more than just ourselves. It feels right, right here.

 

North Cairn can be contacted at 791-6315 or at:

ncairn@pressherald.com

 

Copy the Story Link