I call these Novembers "Noctobers." As I have redefined the term "landscape" as "walkscape" (in some of my earlier rambles) I now have taken license with the Julian calendar in a piquant attempt to match prevailing weather patterns here to our less-yielding (or changeable) numerical designations of the periods in time that organize our lives. The eleventh month is now ten and a half (or ten and three quarters?).
Frankly, I thought the leaves could have hung on the trees just a little longer this year. Here it is: all seasonable and a bit drier out now, but most all leaves on trees have blown down and been raked up. I like to see bunches of oak and maple trees of our mixed deciduous (or "mast") forests still covered with leathery, brown leaves that rasp against each other in the snowy winds of December and January. They are beautiful and block the wind better, too, if you're out in the walkscape on a windy afternoon.
Ah, well: the winds and the rains conspired in cyclonic September and October (Septober?) bustles to cool down the bright, acid burn of the dying leaves and made them soggy as limp cornflakes. (It was quite a hurricane season afterall.) Then they came down in brown, black and half-green yellow throngs - half dry. So here we are - without our late November poetry. (But, that's "Noctober" for you.)
At least we have some of the hazy days that "true" October used to bring - out here in Noctober. Some days are even as crisp and enticing as "true" October can be, the sky very blue as only autumn can make it. Tree branches stick up gray and naked in the bright daylight, as pregnant with possibility as if it was early spring. Sure enough, a few days reminded me of March, this actual November. All that was missing was the tenuous chirps of a few Spring Peeper tree frogs to make this false spring seem real. And what ever happened to Indian summer? Indian summer was once something you felt in October back before Noctobers existed. It was red, yellow and tan and accompanied by warm days you could barbeque and swim outside in. Indian summer is now a leafless affair, consisting of a day or two of shirtsleeve weather on a leafless North Shore. Only the lemon-lime of shrubs and underbrush in a kind of brown-stained green meets the eye. The grass is still green, too. But the tree colors went by too fast.
