Season of Mists

Summer's End

I'm feeling a little sluggish today.  It's been so hot, and then we had the tempest, and now it's humid.....  And everything has slowed down.  

Summer's end's around the bend just flying

The swimming suits are on the line just drying

I'll meet you there per our conversation

I hope I didn't ruin your whole vacation

Just a week or so ago I was photographing butterflies sipping nectar, and newly fledged birds were pestering their parents for food....  And then came the great heat and every living thing just hunkered down in the shade, panting for water, saving its energy.  And then it rained, for forty days and forty nights it seemed, and just about everything got in the ark and sailed away.....  And now, it's quiet.  The buzzard will perch with the dove (ok, pigeon).....

And those same wires are the gathering place for young swallows, about to dive south to avoid the cold of winter.....

My daily walks have seen the seasons swell and bloom, and now the harvest's in and seeds are ripe and young are grown, there's a peace upon the landscape, a slow, almost dull heaviness.  The hares are lacking their spring, 

Mixed flocks of tits twitter to keep together in the bushes, but they aren't singing....

There are fishermen about, filling themselves with plump young fry....

Or just enjoying the play of running waters

Most of the harvest is in.  Some fields are drying still, but the pigeons are having a field day, gleaning the fallen grains....

And the littler birds (goldfinches, sparrows, yellowhammers, et al) are feasting on thistles and other light seeds.....

And in the meantime the bees, and flies, are carrying on where the butterflies left off....  Presumably they have not been as affected by the rain?

It is strange to think that, on Ferragosto (or, if you prefer, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), the summer seems to have come to an end, and autumn is beginning.  Season of mellow fruitfulness?  I suppose, if you consider that Spring is getting ever earlier round here, then it is inevitable that Autumn must also creep back in the calendar?  It can hardly become later, can it?

And it may perhaps be in my imagination that these misty days are autumnal, but see these pictures, all taken in the last day or three:

Parasol

Bramble

Field Maple

Hazel

Elderberries

Hawthorn

Sloes - Blackthorn

Acorns - Sessile Oak

Acorns -English Oak

Beechmast

As I said, things are slowing down.  Although swallows continue to scissor the air above the fields, their speed a reminder of how fast the time is flying,

The rest of the world is slipping into lethargy.  

I admit to a certain tiredness, a listless feeling that this virus has worn us all down, and that the future is a darkening tunnel.  I have no faith - not in the leaders who care more about themselves, and power, than the hot-polloi.  Nor in any hope that life will return to 'normal' at the end of this tunnel.  There are good things, of course, and, for my part at least, things could be much worse.  

But I am feeling sluggish.... 

Forgive me.....

The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking

I still love that picture of us walking

Just like that ol' house we thought was haunted

Summer's end came faster than we wanted

Come on home

Come on home

No you don't have to be alone

Come on home

Come on home

No you don't have to be alone

Just come on home

Summer's End

John E Prine / Patrick James McLaughlin

Birches

And life is too much like a pathless wood....

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

A little over one hundred years ago Robert Frost wrote these lines.  He was struck by the pliable beauty of birch trees, especially as he observed their tender twigs weighted down with ice on a freezing morning after rain.

Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored 

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

He sees the trees bowed down, 

trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

Perhaps thinking of John Keats? He could see Autumn.....

sitting careless on a granary floor, 

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind....

Aah!  The wonderful power of imagination.....

Frost remembers swinging from such trees as a boy himself, and describes how a lonely farmer's son might have swung on all these trees.  He describes the technique, touching the excitement:

He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

And Frost meditates on whether he might climb one again.....

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

For, as he says,

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open. 

I'd like to get away from earth awhile 

And then come back to it and begin over.

Yes. It would be good to get away from earth.....

But, to come back, and begin again;

I'm not so sure.....

There are attractions, of course, but if you could leave, and then come back, who would want to pick up where they left off?  

Or start again at square one?  

Look at the damage we have done.  

Are doing.  

If we had the choice to start again without stepping off the path and on that butterfly, OK.  But to be a new born thing today is not to be envied.

To be fair, Frost did say:

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

And in this he is right - we don't have any options.  Earth is the right place for love.....

But not everyone is blessed with love.  Look at the tears on this tree....

Frost aspires,

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But he doesn't really want to go.  He wants his cake,

And he wants to eat it.....

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

OK.  Indeed.  Frost's poetry is about things that matter.  As he says, [a poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom.....No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

I walk across the snow on Nomansland Common, the winter sun low in the morning, dark clouds mustering above the cold land.  Silver birches stand in clumps, their white stems gleaming, their dark twigs glistening with ice.  We brought our children here when we had just moved in, fifteen years ago or so.  

These beautiful trees shiver in the chill, but hold dear memories.  We don't play as we once did, but....

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Time passes.  We forget.  And are forgotten.  I don't even know if I knew that Robert Frost read at the inauguration of President John F Kennedy.  I certainly didn't know the poem he read.  How differently these words  resound today.....

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

The Gift Outright

And, above

Birches

by

ROBERT [Lee] FROST

1874 - 1963

https://youtu.be/aBw-OaOWddY