241108 october 2024 - we've had it

 October 11

The wind has been howling in the night as if it would blow the house down. It was 15 degrees at four in the morning, but now it is down to 11 degrees. The leaves, which were splendid, have been torn from the trees in the millions. I am always astounded at the profligacy of nature, throwing a summer's work away like yesterday's newspapers. The abundance, then the destruction, so that it will go to soil for some future summer. The leaves lie years deep in the forest, making earth for a decade from now, when the trees will bring forth another season's leaves to be thrown away in that fall. Haha, I just saw the "fall" in fall.

In the morning the sun hits the ridge and brings out the reds.

After the winds, the trees are bare and a wintry sun sets early.

The geese have suddenly taken to the sky, leaving (leaves) in a burst of urgency to be gone by first frost. The frost, like Thanksgiving, is late this year, especially since last night's warm wind. We have had the fire on once, but I am not wasting wood when we don't need it.

That straggling line of dots against the clouds is a V of geese. You can hear them calling as they travel and if you look up in time you can see them.

Rocky does not like the wind and hurried in the house each time I opened the door. K and I were both up at four to hear (more than see) the wind. It sounded like a jet taking off, like the sea, like a highway rushing. The power blipped, but we are on a protected line because of the farm at the bottom of our road, while Rain's farm has lost power until the electricity people get around to the northern stretch of their road. (There is a reference in literature, I am sure, about dogs "seeing" the wind, but I am unable to find it.) As dawn approached the stars came out. 

*****

We have had five deer visiting the apple trees daily, and a rafter of turkeys. (Though why a rafter I am not sure.) I seem to have missed getting a photo of the group of five. Hunters are out now, after them. The hunters put out apples and carrots to draw the deer, and use rifles for the kill. Seems unfair.

 

Turkeys, feathered dinosaurs.

*****

October 20

Thanksgiving has come and gone. Tal raises turkeys; they were killed the weekend before Thanksgiving and Rain cooked two for the Thanksgiving party at their farm. They were excellent. She is an amazing cook. She was always in charge of the graveyard - gravy, I mean (Rain wants to be a "death doula"/funeral director - hence the graveyard!) at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I seem to remember that eggs were her only other go-to in the kitchen. Elf was the same, knew very little about cooking until she was forced to learn when she lived on her own. Tamar cooked from the time she could stand on a chair at the counter. She became a professional chef before ending up an IT specialist with a financial firm. Back to Thanksgiving - it ushered in several days of cold, wet weather. We even got snow one day, which settled on the runs at Jay's Resort in Vermont, but it was a couple of days later that we had an overnight frost. Then it was time for St. Luke's little summer, which we used to call Indian Summer, but that is obsolete now since the North American "indian" name has been rightly put to rest. The sun has been shining and the temperatures have risen into the high teens each day.

The first snow, October 16.

The runs at Jay's Resort in Vermont. I wondered if they were already skiing.

*****

The vineyard has been sold. We have been granted another eight months here, by the new owners, and then we must say goodbye to our paradise. I have not even begun to mourn. It seems unreal, although it was never ours. We know that we have been very privileged to have these years here. I love this house. It is spacious and plain, unique, and possibly haunted. But the ghost is friendly.

K and I are out every morning to watch the sun come up. It is magical, touching a deep part of our mind that remembers a million years of sunrises that humans have honoured, an ancestral connection beyond conscious understanding.

*****

November 1 

Halloween was an enjoyable time; I went trick-or-treating with Rain, Tal, and Fox. It drew me into the present, to see the whole town partying in costume and good humour, and took away some of the existential angst which tends to discount the daily joys that can keep us afloat. Fox was a mummy, and Elf's son, Cricket, a nightmare clown. Indre was the Mad Hatter!Tamar had excellent luck finding second-hand items for that costume. Robin looked excellent as a ninja.

This is Fox in his mummy costume. Rain made it. Excellent! When I suggested that he be a lion or a frog in one of his warmy costumes, which are quite good, she said that she felt she would betray my tradition of home-made costumes! I was touched. I turned out quite a few home-done costumes, including a refrigerator for Elf! The door opened and there was food inside and in the door shelves. It started to rain when we left the house and Elf insisted we return home so as not to ruin the costume. I whipped up an excellent artist's costume instead with a white blousy blouse, a colourful tam, paintbrush and pallet. One year I made Tamar into a four-armed, one eyed alien! Rain was a pirate one year - I found a red, waisted coat with gold buttons, modified a hat into a tricorn, added lace at her cuffs and throat, and a mustache. I was always a witch, in a draped cloak I made many years ago.

*****

November 6

This morning for the first time I am viscerally feeling fear of climate change. It has been 15 degrees C overnight, again, and I sit outside at seven in the morning in a warm wind from the south. We have had a few nights of frost already and the first snow. This morning's warmth is too weird. It does not help that I am rereading Fifty Degrees Below, the second of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, about climate change. It is such a scary series because it seems to be a futuristic sci-fi story but it is happening now. A yellow butterfly landed on my shoe. He came back a second time: my shoe is pink.

No segue: we are watching a program called Hack your Health: the secrets of your gut. It is scary, too. Maybe that is the segue. Our western diet is destroying our health and maybe our very existence. We need to return to a whole foods diet, but that is time-consuming and poor people don't have the time. We also live such a sedentary lifestyle that we cannot consume the calories of a whole food diet to get all the nutrients we need. Most of us eat a two thousand calorie diet which does not allow for all the nutrients to be sourced from whole foods. K and I have slipped away from our better diet in the past year. It is challenging to find the energy to cook whole foods and we have been leaning heavily on processed meals. 

So, there is the segue: the climate and our food resources are both dictated by large global corporations whose interests lie in money, not the future or our health. Governments are in the pockets of these corporations. It will have to be, as I have said before, a terrible revolution, either by mankind or by nature, to restructure life on the planet. My heart breaks for our grandchildren.

Today's sunrise: this is looking south, the sun is rising far to the left, turning the whole sky pink.

This post has been many weeks in the works, and I have been struggling to get it done , but the days pass with little accomplished beyond meals and the washing of dishes. Oh, and the stacking of wood for the winter.

 

Last face-cord of wood done. The rest is in the woodshed.

Be well. There is a new world coming. Climate change, extremes of wealth and poverty, Trump. Human kindness must win through. "Always generous" as Frank says in Fifty Degrees Below. I will not despair. 

Rare to see colour in the west when the sun sets. 

Mumma Yaga