A New Season
Yesterday and this morning, walking into my office, I had the distinct sense of having traveled to a new season, as if I’d spent the night on a long-distance train and woken in a different climate zone, with leafless winter light.
It does feel like the end of fall here, or the beginning of a different kind of fall. Fall Part II. Fall Strikes Back. For A Few Windstorms More. I recently read an Angela Carter story in which she declares that the American preference for ‘fall’ to ‘autumn’ indicates an obsession with the Fall of Man. I think she might be giving us too much credit, but then I didn’t grow up in one of the sterner Protestant denominations, and there was a decided lack of Milton in my undergraduate English courses. Though there is something amusingly somber in having Standard Time cover the dark winter months; we stray to Daylight Savings for summer—and even that under the cover of efficiency, of saving daylight—but we’ll always fall back, even if Congress shifted the date when big business asked (that’s what they spent time on in the early ’00s?)
A number of shifts coincided this weekend: October to November, the return to standard time, and, here in New England, eighteen hours of wind and rain baring the trees. Daylight is getting distilled; brief, sharp-shadowed, the hills far and purple.
For the moment, I sort of ridiculously enjoy it (talk to me late in January…). But for the moment the light casts me back to hiking above the Lauterbrunnen valley off-season. The hotels were empty and discounted, the air filled with cowbells. I wonder if now I’d find the glaciers retreated, the leaves still green.
