Here Comes the Sun

It was 70 degrees on Saturday and I was working up a sweat, leveling
the ground with a mattock, setting concrete blocks to extend one of the
garden beds. No need to think of ice frozen across the creek only a few
days ago and more bitter cold to come. This may be December, but it
won't officially be winter until the solstice, so it must be autumn still.

I have to dig into the chert below the bare inch or so of soil. It's a slow
job. I have to stop every few minutes to remove the rocks, and I've had
to use a crowbar and hammer to dislodge some of the bigger ones. In a
normal subsoil, the smaller rocks could help promote drainage, but in chert
they serve to bind the clay into something resembling concrete. Occasionally
I expose an earthworm and quickly re-bury it so it can continue to hibernate.
Buckie eats the grubs I uncover. Sometimes he starts trying to dig with me
He seems to think I am trying to dig out some creature, such as a mole,
for that is the reason he would have for digging. But the chert is so hard
packed he loses interest and wanders away.

There's a ridge to the west of here so these short days are even more
quickly truncated as the sun drops low in the sky. Then I have to put
on my coat. It feels like autumn again.

I'm thinking about the last year my maternal grandmother was alive and
we sat outside without sweaters on Christmas Day. Ever after we called
it the shirtsleeve Christmas.

And I'm thinking of how the seasons of the earth have been used as an
analogy for the ages of humans. There's the September Song, for instance:
"and the days grow short when you reach December..."

Mother used to say she was living on borrowed time after she'd passed the
Biblical three score and ten. Falling leaves, bare skeletal trees,
teetering on the edge of winter.

Well, we are all living on death row. The difference between me and that
teen-age boy who was killed in an automobile accident last week is that I
have been fighting gravity for enough years that I'm aware there can't be
too many left. Yet it is still fall for awhile...

Heavy rains have leached the bright colors from the leaves carpeting the
yard and left them a motley brown. So far I've filled seven trash bags and
still have no rake to replace the one destroyed in the house fire, but the
leaves are so deep in some areas it's been easy to gather them. The large
leaves from the sycamore tree quickly fill a bag. I've set the bags up
near the road where the sun will hit them and help turn them to compost
for my garden beds, and where they will help insulate the place where a
water pipe cracked last summer and spouted a geyser that cost me a $60
water bill.

When I was acquiring this place, the seller, who built the house and lived
in it for a few years, told me, "Don't rake the leaves! Let them rot,
they're good for the ground!" And he was to tell me again, and yet again,
as if he had invented the idea of enriching the earth with rotted leaves. Or
did he think I was decrepit and hard of hearing, I was only in my 60's then.

Gil and I, as first time gardeners on the Menlo lot, had subscribed to the
magazine "Organic Gardening", so I knew something about using leaves to
build good earth. So I didn't rake them. And when the creek flooded the
yard in February, as it does almost every year, it pulled into its swirling
waters all the leaf remains along with any topsoil they'd help create when
it receded.

The next year I bagged some of the leaves and set the bags, three or four
of them, beside the house foundation, thinking they could help insulate and
maybe help keep the waterpipes from freezing.

And when the creek rose again the bags were broken open, the leaves
carried off.

I'd like to think of fall as a time of rest after the harvest, of fields lying
fallow. But just like the farmer who didn't actually rest, but turned to different
chores, there's plenty here to do outside, and not just work.

My middle son, who is a forest ranger, bought me an LED light on an elastic
band to wear on my head. He said I could walk along the creek at night and
see any animals more easily in its bright light. It's also good for a night walk
in the woods, it leaves my hands free to push aside branches and briers. By
the time Buckie and I started out on Saturday night it was down to 35 and
the brilliant white light showed my breath as a dense curling fog that obscured
my vision. There was a clamminess to the cold that made it seep into me, so
we didn't go far before we turned back.

Then Sunday it was again up to 70! The crows seemed especially
delighted, flying from tree to tree and calling to one another in their
raucous voices. They seemed to be playing a game. I frequently see
them in the pasture looking big as chickens walking around. One is
crippled, so I know it is the same bunch that has been hanging around
for years.

I worked a little while at the garden bed, then I put the tools aside and
spent the rest of the afternoon just dawdling and poking around. I was
sorry I had taken down the hammock and stored it away.

It is good to have this hiatus, to be able to be outside in the sunshine on
these warm December days. It is good just to be.