Fall Rituals
Fall is here. It's sweatshirt weather again. Thank goodness. The leaves will begin to drop. (Though we've been having tree problems all summer long.... The leaf above is a good example of the damage done by some sort of disease or bug. Two of our maple trees took major hits. We'll need to mow the lawn one more time to mulch what's left, though the mower itself is reaching the autumn of its years. Whatever...) Ahhh, Fall... Silence,.. Cool and cold. Read that, "raw soaking quohogging weather". A time to bake bread, brew beer, make clam chowder, and grill real burgers. A time for a warm home with the right food cooking, all seeped in slanted reddish-yellow light and Carole King's "Tapestry". It always amazes me how the tourists will run away from the Cape as soon as September and October come around - those are the best months. Their loss.
As for the birds... We haven't seen an oriole in a while, and the finches are obviously gone. The hummingbirds hold fast and provide almost non-stop entertainment. The usual suspects (blue jays, chickadees, red-wings, grackles) loiter as well. Interestingly, the crows have almost become part of the family. They like their snacks when they like them, and they don't mind protesting when they don't get something. (I gotta tell ya it's weird looking up from your computer and seeing a familiar crow staring at you from the local branch. It's kind of freakish in a Hitchcockian sort of way.)
Anywho... The summer draws down, and no one has ever described it better than Emily Dickinson in poem #1540:
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, --
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone, --
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
See you by the feeders,
CapeCodAlan
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: Inside Birding
Cornell Ornithology Laboratory: All About Birding
