NOVEMBER TRAITS
[Illustration]
By the time November comes the year is used to the caprices of the sun
and no longer frantically brings out flowers for his gaze or hides them
in hurt surprise from his indifference. Now the year is resigned,
untroubled of hope, far off from impatient April with her craving and
effort. Experienced month, November waits ready to face the snows. She
wraps up the buds too warmly for sleet to pierce their overcoats,
comforts the roots in the woods with mats of wrecked leaves, spreads a
little jewelry of frost as a warning before the black frosts come, and
for all else lives in the moment. November has been through this before.
But sometimes, in a reverie, she delights the blue jays and persistent
wild asters by a day of Indian summer.
There has been a great deal of ill feeling about Indian summer, and the
kinder way is not to persecute those who have since youth believed and
will maintain forever that it comes in October. Victims of this
perverted fancy, they will go through life calling the first hot spell
after Labor Day Indian summer. Every fall one explains to them that this
brief season of perfection may come as late as Thanksgiving, but the
very next year they will be heard to murmur, under frostless skies,
"Well, we are having our Indian summer." Let them go their indoors way,
or follow the deserting robins down to Paraguay! Indian summer could
just as well come when the oaks have turned forlorn if it wanted to. In
truth, it comes and goes, by no means exhausted in a solitary burst of
flaring sumacs, fringed gentians lighted by frost along the rims,
damson-colored alder leaves and old yellow pumpkins, perilously exposed
among forgotten furrows, now that the corn is being drawn in. It goes,
and comes again, which is its charm--the one time of year that cannot be
calendared.
There is in all the world a small, choice coterie of people who like
November and March best of the months, and it must be admitted that
these are often a bit arrogant about their refined perceptions. They
manage to look down upon the many of us who prefer the daisy fields to
the time "when hills take on the noble lines of death." But whims of the
worshiper steal no splendor from the god. June has nothing to place
beside a moonlit November night, whose shadow dance of multiform boughs
is never seen through leaves, while shadows on the snow are hard of
outline, unlike the illusive phantoms running over autumn's brown grass.
June has no flowers so quaint, pathetic, and austere as the trembling
weeds of November. What does the goldenrod, white with age, care for
frost? All winter it will shake out seeds unthriftily upon the snow,
standing with a calm brotherhood who have gone beyond dependence on the
day. June's forests do not take a thousand colors under a low sun.
June's gray dews have no magnificence of frost. June's incorrigible
sparrows are not the brave, flitting "snowbirds" whose sins we forgive,
once we hear them chirping in a blizzard. June is a lyric, November a
hymn.
The squirrels have put away enough nuts to last through the holidays,
and after that they come out and get something else--no one ever knows
what. They have gone off with most of the acorns, leaving the fairies
their usual autumn supply of cupless saucers. No birds worth fighting
with are left, for the crows will not notice them, so they go for the
chipmunks. Sometimes at the wood's edge a bird that came only with the
blossoms and that should long since have gone sits lost, half grotesque,
on a stark twig--spent and beautiful singer, belated by perversity or by
untimely faintness of wing! The muskrat's winter house is ready, but no
happy quiet such as his good citizenship deserves is in store for him,
because soon the trappers will begin their patrol of the forest, and his
skin, called wild Patagonian ox, the exquisite new fur, will bring a
good price. Emotional wild geese still pass overhead in the dawns and
sunsets--the crows can scarcely conceal their amusement: "What nonsense,
to be always coming or going!" The crow does not remain in the pale
North simply out of devotion to us. He is above mortal vicissitudes;
behind his demoniac eye dwells a critique of humanity which he would not
be bothered to utter if he could. The soul of the satirist once abode in
a crow.
Forsaken nests and rattling reeds along the stream, pools in the hollows
edged with thin ice, ragged leaves clutched at by the winds, desperate
buds of hepatica and cowslip where a sloping bank catches warmth at
noon, fences stripped of vines and ghostly with dead clematis, a few
frozen apples swinging on the top boughs, trampled fields and pelting
rain--and with it all a grandeur more serene than melancholy. November's
lovers are not perverse, declaring this. They see half-indicated colors
and hear low sounds. They love the mellow light better than the blaze of
rich July, and they are loyal to November because she speaks in quiet
tones not heard through the eagerness or snow silence of other months.
It is the sentimentalist who sees only gloom and the weariness of
departure now. November is ruddier than many a day of spring and the
sharp air forbids languor. Indian summer, her gift and our most fleeting
season, is like the autumn ecstasy of the partridge, passionate and
irresistible, but not ending in despondency because he knows it will
return, and it is like joy in that it cannot be foreseen nor detained.
The bacchanal may have dreaded November, not the dryad.