Autumn Song

Nature passes from vigor to lassitude in the fall. Its loosens its grip on the leaves, which themselves have gone mad, turning in their green uniforms for radical red and revolutionary orange; the toxic sumacs which usually keep their heads down and don't say very much, trying to keep themselves unobtrusive, throw caution to the winds and fly in crimson capes, advertising their poisons, threatening to come back next spring to spread disaster and calamine! And the staghorn sumacs offer their diadem fruits to anyone whose eyes chance upon the ruby bobs swaying in the breeze. They offer a promise of  old time Indian lemonade to drink, old time apples to juice, and old time smells that have not existed since before the War.
When I stroll through a wooded lot, all the disastrous development of recent years falls away, and even the horrendous, jagged scars I chance upon are now beginning to heal. I have found that no matter how much I have looked upon the clear-cutting destruction we have inflicted on ourselves - and the most poignant and Slaughterhouse 5 examples are those areas cleared just before the Fall of 2008; no matter how much the landscape has been denuded, in my dreams, the land is always filled with reeds, cattails, bulrushes, and foreign papyrus, phragmites and loose-strife; and no growing thing is alien: my dreams are not xenophobic. Everything that grows is welcome in a big, booming Bombadil embrace.
Every stretch of coast that I have become used to seeing burdened by unrelenting condos and houses...why, in my dreams, there is a sandy walk through the dunes down to the beach. Grasses grow tall and faery, and grasses grow dwarflike and stubbed, but I wonder where all the real estate has gone... not that I miss it.
The telephones have party lines, the afternoon sun drifts through dimity and lace, notebooks are black leather, furniture is wooden, and the blue sky is a back-drop everywhere I look. The cities and urban concentrations suffer from the elements: downtown the old two-storey buildings sink into the rising waters, and we look to the hills as we dump water from our boots. We feel acid-like in the work day sun, and drink on the way home, falling dead drunk within the row boat that floats down river. Our cottages become inundated and the summer cottage games we play at night float from their cupboards: Monopoly, Clue, Jury Box; ancient games with old-time names played  by classy dames around a hurricane lamp, listening to moths against the screens. Everywhere you look, there is an old man with a long beard sitting on an Adirondack chair.

Everything growing talks to us. Quietly. We have to be quiet to hear it. It doesn't argue about global warming or pollution, but it does speak. I first noticed this when I used to jog for about 30 miles a week outdoors: I could predict the coming winter weather quite well, no matter how unusual it would be. I won every bet I made on the weather. It was a parliament of millions, yet it was harmonious and well-trained. Not a cacophonous rupture of the ears, but a surprisingly pleasant binding... like a goofy Canada winter hat with ear flaps that you swear you'd never wear... until that bitter cold day you put it on, and maybe snowshoes, too, and mukluks, and you learned to intuit like Inuit.
The voices of Autumn are singing.

pix:    plantcare.com
inspiration: ruth  at synchronizing