November

I always think of October as rounding the corner. We begin the month with the foliage party: everything ablaze. We wear T-shirts to walk the dogs and still feel the warmth of the slanted autumn sunlight until late afternoon.

The sheep mill around the pasture nibbling and enjoying afternoon naps at the edge of our woods. Our garden slows buts continues to produce. Bees venture out for cleansing flights and buzz past me as I wander up our road carrying vegetables in my green basket, dogs darting round my legs.

As the month ended we found the edges of those corners to be sharp. In less than one week we dealt with loss, grief and difficulty. November had arrived.

We’d kept one eye on the calendar and had been spending Sundays winterizing. Last week I’d cleared garden beds of the Rapunzelesque tangle of old cucumber vines, dragging the green pile to the compost. I carried a silver metal bucket full of garlic cloves for planting the beds that Paul had filled with year-old manure that morning. Kneeling down, I pulled on gloves and pushed two fingers into the chilly soil to make room for the clove. Our oldest Border Collie, Sam, had followed me down and meandered into the garden. Perhaps remembering summer days of carefully nibbling fattened raspberries from their stems, and since he, at fourteen, doesn’t see well, he came over to me, delicately sniffing. My gloved hand was full of manure and he quickly reached out and grabbed a clump for a chew. I held out a flattened hand to show him that there was no treat, it was all manure.

Halloween ends October and this year abruptly ended fall. November winds snuck down the mountain the night before, blowing our wind chimes around as we slept. We woke to wet snow on the ground and temperatures in the low twenties. Our sheep had been pulled from the fields a few days before and bellowed from their winter paddock, asking for a few more days of green grass. As I went about my morning chores, I knelt to fill their water trough only to find the line was frozen.

As the day passed the snow started. I sat at the cherry bar in our kitchen and quietly watched it, enjoying the warmth and sporadic ticks of the wood stove expanding: it, like us, being surprised at suddenly being called into action. Now was no time for meandering into getting ready for winter. We are chasing the cold, bundled up in wool clipping the fields, wrapping the hives in black tar paper, draining the water lines and piling manure as blankets for garden beds.

I am a child of November, happiest in the cold, content with the gray. Born on the first day of hunting season, my childhood birthday parties were spent with either an empty seat that my father would have occupied or unshaven men, hunting friends of my dad’s, crowded round the table enjoying my cake. There is a loneliness as well as darkness in November. It is the month of endings.

This has been a difficult time. I find myself wishing I could push away sorrow and death, but farming teaches me that is impossible; it is as much a part of the seasonal cycle as new life. I’m learning to be still with difficulty, to let it pass through me like the cold November winds.

Challenges make us feel as if something has been taken from us, but happiness is not found as a state of being, it is found in the cracks and crevices of our lives. It is the propolis, almost invisible, that holds our personal hive together, protecting us from the storms.

In our garden, now faded and frozen, Sam sniffs at my hand, not expecting, not anticipating, but quietly hoping. One of these times there will be something more there and it won’t all just be manure.

No sun- no moon!

No morn-no noon-

No dawn-no dusk-no proper time of day-

No sky- no earthly view-

No distance looking blue-

No road- no street-no “T’other side the Way.”

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member-

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,

November!

Thomas Hood