In praise of brown

The foliage season this year has been brief and brown. We saw lovely color on Columbus Day weekend but had to travel north of Ellsworth to do so. The mid-coast never really reached the full left-hand side of the spectrum. In the suburbs of Boston most everything is still green. Late October snowfalls are completing a somewhat dismal picture.

At least the brown colors are amazing. Not usually a word to associate with "brown," I know, but the richness of the array on hillsides and next to roads has been outstanding this past week. I say "rich" deliberately; although individual bursts of reds and oranges and yellows are rare, most leaves have something of them, and they blend together in a huge variety of shades of brown. I've never appreciated its complexity until now. And the contrast with the bare white birch, the blue sky, the dark green firs, the bright green of hay field and lawn and verge makes the color sing.

Brown this year is not muddy. It is warm with licks of flame, hints of sun, flashes of the tropics. It represents the way I want to go into winter, not with a tourist blast, then nothing, but with a soft, slow falling into black and white.

Passing of time

Watching television can best be - kindly - described as passing time. Slightly more elevated is the excuse that it's a recovery mechanism from the rigors of the day. (Public television, they say, needs no excuse.) Philip Larkin, librarian and poet who famously declined to be England's Poet Laureate, implied such therapy in an answer to a question about his day (part of an interview -actually, written answers to written questions that took him five months to complete - published in the Paris Review):

"My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there's my way - making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works."

I'm guessing that time was Larkin's friend. For the folks who rush about, time must be an enemy to be defeated or overcome or ignored until, well, until it kindly stops for them. Those of us of the rural persuasion empathize with Larkin. He had his routines, as do we, our circadian rhythms, our tides, our mornings of cerebration and afternoons of perspiration, and if our evenings also include cop show re-runs on the idiot box, then we too must be poets.

Actually, I'm looking forward to the state of mind of the 90-year-old mother of a friend who, when asked if she watched television, said, "No, I'd rather sit in my big, comfortable chair and watch the memories in my head."

The last "One last time"

OK, so today is absolutely, positively the last time the deck is sit-out-able. I know I said this 10 days ago, and then had the embarrassment of Columbus Day weekend when all three days were warm enough to be outside from morning till evening, even so far as to cause a little gentle perspiration. But today is it. It's a little cool, around 60, but the wind is from the south following two days of an ocean storm, and the surf is strong and sensual, and I'm reasonably comfortable in a sweater and double socks (a chorus of crows makes me look up and see a bald eagle flying just 50 feet away along the shore), suffering one last teasing hint of summer.

But I suppose there will be some kind of Indian summer later this month, and the agony of all this emotion will be repeated. With luck I'll be in Massachusetts and not succumb again to fresh air and uplifting heart. Let's just be done with this beautiful weather. Let winter come and let me sit by the wood stove in the dark and once again think clearly.

Columbus Day foliage

Three lovely ladies and I took a foliage tour yesterday, up Route 1 and 1A to Bangor, and then over to the Union River watershed east of Bangor and north of Ellsworth. There were several highlights: LL1's unbridled enthusiasm for the colors, houses, and character of New England; LL2's expert pictures as seen below; and for me, sitting at a picnic table on the Bangor's urban, slightly seedy waterfront and watching two bald eagles soar over the Penobscot River. Then there was LL3. She, being a dog and having one or two genes left that at least hint at wildness, was not particularly happy being in a people mover for 6 hours, especially when her highlights including obsessive lap sitting (which she can get at home) and a few pit stops - at an Irving's gas station (I doubt she looked up to see this pretty tree gracing the parking lot),

and a short jaunt along a country lane, but note the taut leash pulling me back to the comforting laps of the LLs in the car.

She just wasn't into it like we were, oohing and aahing at hills and lakes and fields. She was cut off from her world - the world of scents, deer and dog, scat and pee, sandwich bits and rabbit hair and cigarette butts and Coke cans and emanation of squirrel. She was in a car, not knowing what would happen next.

We drove hoping what would happen next, and were rewarded. Blueberry fields are stunning at this time of year....



as are shores of rivers and lakes.

One also hoped for a moose to step out of the woods, but then one should be grateful for what wildness still remains, still so close, still so beautiful, even in the overactive nose of a dog, and the romantic tinge of human eyes.