Autumn's Oft-Interrupted Hush

Lessons amid the halting quiet

Walk through a field this time of year in search of foliage or the last warm days of the year and you will find time to reflect now that the droning din of insects has faded and the biting hosts have mercifully receded. The leaves gently fall, the hayed fields easily yield to your footfalls, and our New England vistas open before you in a riot of gold and crimson. There are fewer things more pleasant than a quiet autumn walk amid the hills of Vermont. Your quietude in the fields and forests may be disrupted however by the late lone cricket, singing a solitary song that will go unanswered by his potential mate who has already departed or died. A walk around the lake too will bring a similar sense of serenity that those good hills provide. The colors at the shore seem to be more vibrant, juxtaposed by the wine-dark water, rippling with the October winds. Look down to where the lake generates from a hundred little creeks and springs coming down the hillsides and you may spot a moose or whitetail deer slaking their thirst in the heat of the day. There is more time to focus on the trees and the water and the wildlife these days; the children have left the water and so too their shrieks of joy as they jump from the bridge. The calls of nervous parents running late have faded or moved into the soccer fields and school yards. You’re joined now by maybe a lone angler or a tourist who doesn’t know the foliage hit its prime zenith last week before the winds and rains came. You may be jarred from your leaf-peeping and deer-spying however by a noisy flock of geese cresting the tree line and blasting overhead. It is hard to feel secure in our decision to live where we live when we see the geese fly south, fleeing the cold; there is always the gnawing question in the back of the mind asking “Do they have better sense than I?” while we know the snows are only weeks away. When you return home and night falls, however, interruptions of a different shade call from the woodline. You may be patrolling your property in the twilight, ensuring the chicken coop and barn are buttoned up and secure when a sharp cry comes from the forest’s edge and shoots straight into your bones — the barking scream of a fox. It may be establishing its territory, it may be scaring off a fight, it may be calling to its kits. It is easy this time of year to hear the hoot of an owl or the cry of a fox and think of all the talons and claws waiting to scoop up a pet or a chicken at the forest’s edge, but stop there in the dusky autumnal twilight, think deeper for a moment, and you may find a comforting thought. Those animals, like you, have decided to remain and endure. They are not the tragic cricket late to the only party that matters. They are not the capricious geese chasing the fair weather. They are grit incarnate ready, like you, to thrive through another long winter. The sun sets and you can enter your warm home wrapped in that fine thought.

Photo by my lovely wife, Lindsey Weaver

There is a hallowed time to be found in the early light of the grey dawn. The mornings are dark now — we have lost much light since the summer solstice when waking before the dawn was two hours more difficult than it is now. With the dark, however, comes the quiet. The children are less eager to jump out of bed, the birds no longer sing at 5:00am, and the family cat seems to be a little more comfortable in the chair by the woodstove these days. The mornings are chill enough now where lighting that stove is welcomed and much good can be wrought by the mother or father who wakes before the family to tend the hearth fire. A fire lit, water boiled, and breakfast made before the first birdsong brings more order and goodness to the world than we may realize or be willing to admit. The good glow from the windows in a woodstove chase away all the October gloom and flood the grey dawn light with an orange that stirs the heart and raises the spirit. The cat certainly seems aware of this, and is content to share the chair by the fire before the little humans with their grasping hands and loud voices wake. While petting your companion by fire there, you feel something though. Something on its neck that should not be there — an engorged late season tick. They took a welcome hiatus in the summer but return now for a final blood feast before their long sleep under the snows. You don’t let this stand — you peel the offending parasite like a burdock seed from a wool sweater and cast it into the flames. A terrible interruption to an otherwise perfect moment. Like the cricket and the geese though, there is a lesson to be found in the briars of the newfound annoyance. It is simple: you were there. You righted a wrong. You were present enough in the hush of the dark morning to find a moment where you could provide a little light. The cat may not even be aware of the good deed done, but you can’t help but note it seems to sleep a little more soundly now there in your lap by the woodstove.

The dizzying drone and procreant urge of summer is over. Autumn has ushered in a quiet that is not the silence of deep winter, but a hush of leaves being blown through a field. This good hush, this welcome interlude, will be halted and stuttered as will many things in life. How we choose to view and react in those moments of interrupted quiet however will define this season and all our seasons yet to come.