November

November is its own season. It’s the hard edges and elemental leavings when the landscape shows its bones and things freeze. Before the softening snow and after the last leaves have blown down or been driven off in a cold rain. It’s the season of once-again dormancy, when life retreats and re-groups. The small animals desiccate and freeze themselves. The plants pull back to the rootstock. 

But for all its bluster and gales, November’s spare stillness is the necessary boundary between alternate states. The undiscovered country when darkness is ascendant and sunlight alternates between gray minimacy and severe clarity. There are those days when the wind changes, and the understory is wet and soft and muted, and the insects are mostly gone, and it’s only you and the winter birds and squirrels in your little spot–and when they leave you, it’s as still and cold as an old painting. And you remember. Because the world stops, and you have only the real moment and fading fragments of past sloshing surreal around.

My mind is the sloppy gearbox of the old VW bus I had as a kid. Finding the forward gear is indistinct like stirring through cold oatmeal with a pencil hoping to feel something familiar. My internal dialog is muffled and dour and dull and I am a thought behind in every conversation. I’ve already written my angry essay. It’s there on the hard drive throbbing with venom. I poke it now and again. 

At 59, I am genuinely blessed, and that works as metaphorical or metaphysical. I was born during deer season, you know. As if I believed in foreshadows. Born to the November transition. Born to the dipole storm and silence. I am blessed with good health, loving family, meaningful work–and a network of friends that reached out to wish me well on my birthday. A voice from my past reached out too, and I was touched. 

One of those voices had homemade cookies for the drive up. One of those friends reached out to tell me to keep the faith, and he makes it possible for my now regular sugarbush therapy. My selfish indulgence, my retreat in the middle of a busy fall semester, where I move heaven and earth to simply sit. To sit with whatever November offers and simply to watch the day pass as the shadows rotate around the old trees and to give in, to re-learn being cold again, to feel the sensation return and ache, and to wonder slowly how much I will welcome and endure. To forget noise.

I am proud of my miserliness, proud that my coveralls are older than my adult kids, proud that I remember when fieldwork was familiar and I was strong, proud that being cold was the part that my family largely didn’t understand. It was something of my own, a bit of distance and isolation, a place to exhale and watch my breath linger there in the sunbeam where I swear, I could see the very texture of the vapor droplets swirling in fractal patterns, tumbling over themselves and spinning out into nothing.

I think I could live forever on trail mix and cold iron-flavored water and hot coffee first thing. I think I could, no should, be comfortable walking the trail in the dark. I think that half-light lingers longer in the morning and falls faster at night. I think that raven calls always sound like they’re leaking in from some far horizon of reality and that crows always sound lonely. I think that time is different for squirrels and that oaks are stubborn. I think that woodpeckers drum for the memory of a friend, forever young. And that she’s there when the gray dome arcs away and the sunset glows electric. I think that I am the noisiest, clumsiest, dumbest thing in the world – lurching and stumbling in the stillness like a drunkard. Like I don’t really belong. Like the poor relation given grace as a kindness. Like nobody taught me the dance. Like there’s much to learn.

The coyotes found my leavings last night and sang ethereal celebration across the sedge meadow, beyond the berm at the edge of the jumble. But close. A red squirrel stared me down, an arm’s length from my face. Scats and tracks in the mud. Big enough to be a young wolf. Someday I’ll laugh like that.

There is a fine and expertly hand-made hunting knife that I carry in my old pack, and I’ve just rubbed it with mineral oil prior to putting it away for another November. It was made by an elderly craftsman in northern Michigan, famous among knife collectors. It’s a thing that I would admire, but would never buy for myself because of how expensive it would be.

The blade is exquisitely sharp and polished to a mirror finish. It is small but the unique stout blade and the curve and the form of the handle make it an extension of my hand when I use it for the job that it was designed for.  Small as it is, it has the heft of a finely made tool. I am normally utilitarian about such things, but this knife in my hand feels like it belongs there in a way that the $18 pocketknife that I’ve carried for decades does not.

It was a gift. A friend of many years was showing me his knife collection and describing each piece with the loving detail that only a committed collector would remember. When I picked this one up and admired it, he smiled and said, “It’s yours.” 

I was stunned — and a bit embarrassed. I tried to pay him for it, but he wouldn’t hear of it and just laughed at me. I think of him and of that moment every time I hold the knife or see it in my sock drawer. And when I slide that knife into the top of my pack, I take a little bit of him, and our friendship, into November with me.

And as I write this, I realize that the gift really wasn’t the knife so much as the example. 

Surprise somebody with your generosity.

Happy Thanksgiving.