Skip to main content

November

Image
By
I've been home the last two days, yesterday on family business, and today because it is a school holiday.

I got to make soup, and bake a cake to freeze in slices for snacks next week, and tend my indoor garden.  And the day was mild and sunny, and I woke up very early, so I was able to wash a week's worth of laundry and hang it outside to dry one last time.

My dog is always very happy when I am drying laundry outside.  He gallops alongside me as I walk across the yard to the clothesline, and lolls about munching the grass--or rolling in it--as I clip socks and tee shirts onto the line.

Sometimes we stop together and peer overhead, or into the woods, at mysterious rustling animals or the wild cold calling of geese passing by.

Female wild turkeys
There is a quiet to November.  After the flurry and rush of September and October, November's hush is a surprise and a relief.  Parent conferences, in-service days, school holidays and Thanksgiving punctuate the school year, but it's more than that.  I see it on my drive to school and back each day.  The woods, so passionately on fire just days ago are faded now to shades of dun and brown and gray.  Brown wild turkeys graze golden stubble in fields of deep, turned earth, and grass fades pale under frost.

The year has finished its long, long out-breath, and is resting, gathering for the in breath at midwinter and on into spring.  A Friend said as much at Quaker meeting this week, but I had been thinking the same before he spoke.  We gained an hour, setting all our clocks back in time, and it has been strange how that hour has affected us all.  Awake now, with just that one more hour's rest, we see how weary we've become.  We feel the need for quiet in our bones, and in the weak cheer of the midday sun.

November is the rest measure in the music, the quiet of the year.  Through tree-trunks stripped of leaves and color, I see the embers of the year lying on the hearth of the horizon.

I love November, as the weary love to rest.  I love November, the pause between the breaths.

Comments

Will T said…
Hi Cat,
Thank you for this post. I do not like 4:30 sunsets but there is something in the dark months that feed my soul.

Will T
10:06 PM
Cat C-B (and/or Peter B) said…
*happy smile* Will... Feeding your soul as much as a cheerio is enough to make me feel pretty good.

Which reminds me--I was interrupted in the middle of reading your last post, and ought to go back to it. Such riches in the pantry!

I agree with you about the 4:30 sunsets, but, oh, I do like that sense of a full larder while the earth is fallow. I think it's even nicer when we're talking about good things to read than jars of pickles and jam. *grin*
12:40 PM
Mama Kelly aka Jia said…
Your post inspired me to bake a cake to bring slices to work myself. of course with 4 other people int he home it is disappearing rapidly and odds are Ill be making another by Wednesday at the latest.
7:30 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fame

By
(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake
41 comments
Read more

Peter on Grief and Communities

By
Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo
4 comments
Read more

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

By
I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag
22 comments
Read more