Autumn Blues

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks, and wasn’t able to make the November Poetry Series reading (Ann and Aimee soldiered on, however, and Dick Lourie and Joan Houlihan were fine readers, so they’ve reported).

We’re having a brief warm spell–high 50’s–but I confess I was smitten with the cold, bitter mornings of the last few days. I’m ready for snow; it has snowed in northern New England and I saw this morning on the news that a Vermont ski area has been able to make snow. It feels like it’s time. Crisp apples, slippers, a warm blanket and a good book, the smell of someone baking turkey. I grew up in New England and have spent most of my life here. I expect certain things to occur with the changing seasons: The body gets heavy, I want to sleep longer hours each night. I am stymied by freak warm patches. They don’t correspond to the slant of light.

We are moving into the dark season. Shorter, more intense days (made more intense mostly due to the failures of light), a kind of inner clamoring that begins to shout get ready! get ready! for the holidays. All that urgency, all that weight. I heard my first Christmas carol on the radio driving home yesterday (sheesh); the displays have been up in some stores since August. The CVS across the street from my apartment building is stocked to the rafters. All that cheap plastic (I did like the wind-up snowmen, though), all those chemically tainted balsam candles. Ah, Christmas.

So, I’ll wrap up with some seasonal selections: Keats’s famous ode and a little taste of Scrooge, along with a pre-turkey poem.

I hope you all get next week off and can spend it with people you love.

— SR