First time, every time, give me the dappled light of morning.

Fall is on us now, like a pursuer we can scarcely tell is there, except for the glaze of ice crystals on the last leaves, the hardy blades of grass going on and on, the pines making the point that they will prevail come winter.

If we didn’t already know the signs — the sudden cold shoulder turned toward us at nightfall, the bristle of daybreak, the muted harvest light — we might miss the way the familiar sharp-edged summer world is softening into autumn, even as it fights to hold the line on the last stand of summer.

I love the harvest, the gathering in and gathering around, the reawakened joys of indoors and home: flannel sheets and mounds of quilts, thick soups stolen from the garden’s cast-offs, the first palatable potato stews (white, sweet, yams), a sea of carrots, tomatoes, beans and a hint of this year’s corn. I’ve waited for months to haul out heavy sweaters and thermal vests, woolen socks and scarves of every design.

I am always anticipating the return of the autumn, the resurgence of the cold. I was born in mid-fall, so maybe it’s just in my genes. Then, too, I changed my name in early December, so my second birth sustained that seasonal allegiance to short days, long nights and the clarity of the hard freeze.

But for now, I am holding onto the shuddering low light as though my life depended on it. I give it full attention as it makes a crazy quilt of color and luminosity out of the landscape: trees of every shade of green, yellow, red and brown — some shimmering like jewels, some surrendering to the slow blood-letting of the cold.

All last week, it seemed the last birds of summer were throating their worship of the late warmth and the imperative to take wing. I knew one morning I would wake to their absence or they to mine, each of us moving in opposite directions; they south, myself north, not just to survive but to move on to the next order of business, getting back to our respective labors.

Though I have been hobbled by an ankle still weak from surgery and have foregone the delight of walking the woods and shores this fall, the endless spill of the light over the marsh and the phragmites ablaze in the sun served as substitute joy and almost made up for my temporarily crippled state that kept me indoors longer than any of my caretakers thought possible.

One afternoon when a friend dropped by to see how I was mending, I asked to have a couple of lawn chairs unearthed and returned to warm weather duty. She lifted the heavy bulkhead doors and excavated from the cellar two aluminum chairs with nylon webbing already bottoming out from the heft of last summer’s sunbathers.

We dragged out the coiled hose, which was snaking its way across the lawn to irrigate the transplanted hydrangeas in the yard, and ran a weary wash over the chairs already draped in spider webs after only a month of storage. We let the half-light and uncertain temperatures of the afternoon accomplish the drying while we had coffee on the porch steps. And then we took up our posts in the trenches of the chairs, let our conversation peter out and drift off toward the bay.

We were just rehearsing the ebbing taking place all around us, the way the season was slipping through our fingers like sand; the long murmur of the waves, mournful and comforting, along the berm; the leaves on the bog vines twitching like blocked nerve synapses; the reeds and sedge bowing their heads, though there was nothing to grieve, not there, not anywhere we could see or care to see.

Give me the dappled sun, I thought then, the infinite dance of a thousand forms too dense to be ethereal that somehow, despite their substance, are transformed into light. Offer me only partial understanding and a chance to search out the rest. Deliver the fall and all its paring power, its majestic death and the breaking of nature’s heart. Lay me down with that, how everything evens out in time, and rises again without me, in the promise of spring.

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

ncairn@pressherald.com

 

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