There are just a few points in time every year when the change on the landscape is both rapid and dramatic. The first snow that marks the start of winter. The first blush of green leaves in the spring. The fiery feel of peak fall color, which we enjoyed the first few days of this month.
And then, the fall of the leaves and our transition to the season of gray.
I find the freshness of each transition to be exciting, even the one that arrives here in the North Country every year about the end of the second week of October. To me, the fall of leaves marks the end of the season of light. Even though our nights became longer than our days in late September, there’s something about the brilliant leaves that seems to extend the light of summer. It’s a grace period before we head into the long darkness.
It’s a time when we know that things are getting serious. The languid days of summer are long gone. The unforgiving steel of winter is approaching, which means it’s time to get ready. In the yard, there’s the summer things to put away. The furniture that sits on the patio. The hoses that watered the gardens now wilted after several killing frosts. There’s still firewood to be split, leaves to be raked, and anything that can’t freeze stored away indoors. The snowblower needs starting and probably an oil change as well. Lazy summer is over and all of its signs must be stored neatly away until the leaves emerge again sometime next May.
Yet it is not just a time for saying goodbye to our easy season. The graying of the landscape brings anticipations of its own, including the peak of the hunt. The grouse, now exposed, are easier prey for hunters. The deer hunt approaches, which means it’s a time for hunters to clear their shooting lanes and bolster their stands. On the edge of the Lost Lake swamp, we’ll also be out the next few weekends clearing trails for the coming snowshoe season.
For us here in the North Country, the fall of leaves brings us back to the familiar. We live seven months of the year without leaves on our deciduous trees, so we’re used to this forest. Our vistas expand as the leaves fall, and our evergreens come into their own, now seeming to dominate the forest. Even the sound of the wind is different, dominated now by the thin rush of the breeze through the needles of pine and spruce. The soft rustling of the aspen and birch leaves has faded.
The forest’s mood changes as well. All that spectacular fall color, which came and went far too quickly this year, lies forlornly on the forest floor. As the summer ferns and flowers die and the trees and shrubs make their own preparations for winter, we recognize the death of summer. That’s especially so this year, when our abundant precipitation produced a season of lushness unlike any we’ve seen in several years. But even the most verdant landscape eventually meets the reality of the changing seasons in the north.
But there are welcome changes ahead. As the temperatures get colder, we shift our lives increasingly indoors. It’s the season when the wood stove begins crackling in earnest and a cup of coffee or tea becomes a welcome hand warmer as well as a drink. The garden’s harvest is in, save for the parsnips and rutabagas, which will only sweeten with the colder weather ahead, and the smell of roasting winter squash fills the kitchen again. The wine from last year’s chokecherries is bottled and ready for drinking during the long evenings ahead.
Through this season of gray, we’ll be anticipating the next milestone in our circle of the seasons. The first real snow that tells us winter is setting in. The first ice on the ponds, and finally the larger lakes. Strapping on our skates and finding that river that we can skate away on. And people still wonder why we live up here? I wonder how we could live anywhere else.