"November is an elemental fugue weaving a counterpoint of sharp, clear, blue-sky days raked with gold-glint light set against leaden gray and wet silver days dark and shaking with winters first storms. Plant and animal life settles down, sap descends to root, and frog, turtle, chipmunk and bear disappear into earthen sanctuary and the sleep of endurance. Leaves fall, needles fall, spent stalks fall and form a murmuring of dry whispers upon the dampening earth. Counterpoint to this settling is the rising presence of the mineral earth seen in the ridgelines, rough with outcrop and gully, emerging through the thinning veil of forest, in the unclad streambank appearing beneath the bare willows, in the long shadow's revelation of the least undulation of the land's surface.
There is a deep quiet in this music. The choruses of birds and insects that set the summer ringing are gone, leaving not silence but stillness and clarity. Individual voices are embroidered on the velvet hush of November like the entwined sonorities of a string quartet: the soft bouncing hoot of the owl. the resiny creaking of dry. bare limbs, the fading tremolo of the last cricket, the deep, soughing continuo of the swelling north wind.
November's beauty is in the harmonies of opposites, of yearning and reluctance, of coming and going. It is the gabbling of geese flying high in cloud-choked sky that speaks of an easy comfort in a sky-far realm, and it is the whisper-roar in the tall, dark pines that suggests it's time to shut snug the door and be glad of home."
Copyright: Steve Manning
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