By November the leaves are down, grey blankets everything, and the cold starts to bite. So why is it still one of my favorite months? Part of it has to do with my birthday and the happy associations that come with it. But it goes deeper than that.
October in Southern New England is one of the most special times of year because this is when the leaves turn. Driving through the countryside or even just commuting to work means explosions of radiant color everywhere you look.
September is a month of clarity. Light and air embrace us in crisp invigoration. The sky bursts with blue and goes on forever. We’re finally unsealed from our climate-controlled, humidity-regulated boxes.
August begins my favorite quarter of the year, when summer starts to transition into fall. The nights remain long, and the heat still reminds me how wonderful air conditioning can be. School hasn’t yet started. There are still dragonflies and bumblebees dancing among the grass. This is when we hit peak cricketsong at night, and the once tiny rabbit in our yard has become a big, beautiful, and extremely fluffy adult.
I’ve just returned from the trip of a lifetime after nearly 46 hours of being awake and traveling home. Exhaustion doesn’t really capture how it feels to do such a long haul, but somehow I got through it, and it was absolutely worth it. You see, I finally had the chance to go to Cambodia and travel on The Khmer Magic Music Bus as it brought traditional Cambodian musicians into towns and villages to demonstrate their expertise. Along the way I also got to explore four different regions of the country and meet so many wonderful, talented people.
Big animals seem to get all the attention. Lions, elephants, and bears have countless books and movies dedicated to them. Don’t even get me started about whales. I’m much more interested in the small creatures of our world. Have you ever watched a slug make its slimy way across a rock, or had an aphid land on your sleeve? Is there anything cuter than a chipmunk? More fascinating than a praying mantis?
There’s a bus stop on my front lawn. I think about this often — how in suburbia, neighbors might post “keep off the grass” signs, but here in my small city, the neighborhood literally comes to me. It’s just one of countless small, cool things I’ve found in semi-urban living that I’ve been reflecting on lately.
Is it naive to have hope right now? Is it just the daffodils and forsythias, explosions of yellow and green that seemed to appear overnight, tricking me into thinking things will eventually get better? Are warm breezes carrying the scent of an awakening earth leading me astray? I don’t know. It’s important to recognize hard times and be realistic about the world as it is, but I also find myself, again and again, coming across things that give me hope.
Everybody’s seeing bald eagles this winter, it seems, but me. We have a bobcat at school (promptly named “Bob”) that’s exploring campus a bit too much for its own good. Hawks circle the skies above our house, and herons wade in the pond up the street. When I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, we didn’t see wildlife like this.
Lately, I’ve been waging a losing battle with winter. The week before last, no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the bone-deep chill that came with the polar vortex’s bitter cold and howling winds. We even had to shut off our upstairs water for days to keep the pipes from freezing. In New England, it’s easy to see winter as an adversary during times like these – until I remember that my house has been standing since 1862, the year the U.S. first started printing paper money.