Weather and Time

There’s been no hard frost yet, but surely, and soon, one will come. Perhaps we won’t mind it as much if it arrives on a clear night, the stars staggering in their plenitude. First frost will be followed by another, and another. Stealthily, each will work its way into the ground, residing there until spring, whenever – forget what the calendar tells you – that may come. 

The grass is still green, but leaf color has peaked. In the garden, slumping remnants of summer bump elbows with mums and asters. On my table a platter of orange gourds and beside it a vase of white phlox and black-eyed Susans make it hard to remember that some years, there’s snow by October’s end. Or that last year, early November now just weeks away, blew in with cold, brutal and unrelenting wind. Hard to recall, too, that just a few months ago, summer days seemed long, the season itself never-ending, the future – if only the autumn colors and yellow school buses – too far in the distance to contemplate.

So is it time to assess summer yet? A season that at its cusp always seems so full of promise, that suggests this time I’ll be able to deliver on all my summer plans – in the garden, in the house, at my desk. All those new trails I’ve yet to hike, books to read, recipes to try, people to meet. In a season, when measured from solstice to equinox, of just 91 days.  

How easy to overcommit in the summer. One too many houseguests welcomed. More than one too many dinner invitations extended, performance tickets purchased, volunteer assignments accepted. And what of the letters I thought I’d write, the poems I’d draft, the manuscript I’d finally finish, the new shade garden I’d surely, after several sketches, plant? And the time just to sit and be?

At this time of year, someone somewhere is toting up her harvest, the pounds of honey, pecks of apples, cords of wood. Soon I will drive west and harvest will be manifest in the acres of cleared corn rows, hay baled in those immense round wheels that, Monet-like, look as though they were gathered in fields only to draw to them the golden autumnal light.

Here on the island, the bounty is less evident. But signs, when you know to look, abound. The farmstands may have closed but bushels of locally grown apples and pumpkins are offered at the grocery store. More refrigerated seafood trucks haul loads up island from the harbor lobster pounds. Those still fishing into autumn and possibly beyond have chased the hard shedders into deeper water and their boats now work the distant horizon daily.

I’m surrounded by a surprising number of people who in their enviable competencies approach self-sufficiency. They keep chickens for eggs, goats for cheese. Their bees provide honey, and though not willingly, their sheep relinquish fleece. Orchards and vegetable gardens, coupled with an ability to preserve and stew, help keep larders full. I admire such talents. I wish I had more of them. At times, I cast my eyes beyond my perennial beds, herb garden, pots on the deck and wonder where, if I were open up more area to the sun, I might pop in a few rows of beans and tomatoes? Perhaps plant a pair of apple trees? I think of winter’s long dark months, the wind against the windows, under the eaves, the coves and bays locked in ice, and were I to reside here then, besides all the writing and reading that would surely get done (wouldn’t it?), what new projects might I take up?

Unlike other islanders, I’m unlikely to do more than tinker in what they do with such competence and seemingly, to this observer’s eye, natural ease. From the amateur’s sidelines, I rejoice in the abundance of those who grow, tend, card and weave. I gladly partake in the cornucopia offered at the Friday morning farmers’ market. For years I was gratified when the late Chapins put up their wooden sign on Route 15 heralding their orchard’s first Gravensteins and Paula Reds. All winter, I pour Carding Brook’s maple syrup over pancakes studded with Hackmatack Farm’s wild blueberries I was wise enough to freeze. Long before spending Thanksgiving on the island was a possibility for us, I vowed I’d order a turkey from Island Acres, even though I’d grown to love the sight of them dumbly flocking atop an old wooden boat that for so long occupied the field where they ranged.

Were I to become a year-rounder, what unlikely path might I wander down? Verlyn Klinkenborg, author and Rural Life editorial writer for the New York Times, once wrote about his interest in getting a few pigs for his upstate New York farm: “I’m giving in to the logic of where I live and the land I live on.”

I seriously doubt pigs are in my future. (Good news for my neighbors.)  I’m happy to obtain my sausage and bacon from Sunset Acres or Quill’s End Farm. And any windfall from any apple trees I’d nurture would surely not go to the pigs, but be left for the browsing deer, if only to turn their attention away from my rhododendrons.

I may not have many of the admirable talents of my neighbors, but I do have a leg up on two women down the road who when moving here year-round from the city didn’t know how to properly stack their firewood and had four cords’ worth topple over three times, or how, when stuffing the wood stove before retiring to bed, it’s necessary to open the stove’s flues. At 2 a.m., red hot does, under certain circumstances, take on new meaning.

Now, in late October, a common current runs through the island’s myriad conversations. Summer is assessed, and in the next breath, there are predictions for the months ahead. “Snow, lots of snow” seems both a worry and a forecast rather than speculation. As if there are only two choices: lots of snow or, in its absence, the prolonged sub-zero temperatures of certain winters. Given those extremes, snow seems widely embraced, regardless how much, how deep. Whatever the weather brings winter-long, reports of it will lead Linda’s weekly e-mails and dominate conversation well past the thaw.

To hear people talk now, to witness island-wide preparations – lobster traps hauled and stacked ashore, plastic taped to the windows of old drafty Capes, hay bales piled against the cellar doors of the island’s earliest farmhouses, a final fling of steaming and preserving in numerous kitchens – it’s as if winter is a tangible being lurking in the wings, some cruel foreman on an assembly line who’s about to flick a switch and hurtle the whole process forward at an unmanageable speed

Going inward seems as necessary an act for us as other species must hibernate in burrow or mudbank. To live here year-round seems to require withdrawal. And yet, before the spring thaw, there’s any number of intervening holidays and community events, some surely created for the sole purpose of connection, of feeding with pot lucks an islander’s emotional well-being as much as her grumbling belly. Without a choice, people submit to winter, but are conjoined by common experience – the reminders around them of another season’s imminent arrival  and the memories of other winters faced down.          

There’s little chance of misinterpreting today’s chill, the gray and brooding sky. If I were a migrating bird foolishly sticking around, I’d immediately take to the air on the next leg of my journey south. If I were a squirrel, I’d put in a full-day’s effort. Instead, two-legged beast that I am, and today a bit lazy, I crank up the heat and over coffee watch Frayed Knot’s captain haul out the last of his lobster traps just off our shore. After, our view will be of nothing but wildness – the broad expanse of sky and islands with their seaward marching pointed firs, and riding the water, a few gulls and loon, small rafts of bobbing eiders.

Time and weather. The two inevitables as we go about our daily business. Living so close to the elements here, the reminders of both are always with us. Tides ebb and flow. Summer ticks away and seasons change. Lobsters shed, come in to feed, return to deep water. The ospreys reclaim their nests then leave them. Wind and rain aids or abets. Prehistoric and ancestral, cycles that are beyond our barometers, clocks or calendars.