A Mighty Nut

 

The last time an acorn got my full attention, I was seven or eight years old. I disguised one in a wax candy wrapper and presented it to my older sister while she was walking with her schoolfriends. She opened it and Gotcha! I don’t remember if she threw the “candy” at me once she unwrapped it, but she should have done. I was kind of a brat.

That momentous prank occurred in Sorel PQ, where autumn differs vastly from autumn in Victoria BC. Many trees shed leaves out here, but cedars, pines and firs generally dominate the landscape and so do their cones and needles. Horse chestnuts often nail unwitting pedestrians on Cook Street, and I code-named the mystery trees along Bushby Street “cereal trees” for clogging the gutters with a windfall resembling Kellogg’s “Special K”. Victoria is also known for harbouring (or should that be “arboring”?) Garry oaks in sundry locales, but I have never noticed an abundance of acorns in any of the ’hoods I’ve called home.

Until this year. At some point in the last few weeks, acorns have appeared almost everywhere. No street seems exempt. The main drag is choked with them. The parking lot is sticky from acorns crushed beneath car tires. Walking anywhere is chancy when you can’t tell by looking if the shell is soft enough to give underfoot. Some are, many aren’t. No wonder the squirrels around here are so tubby; they can’t possible consume every acorn they see, and storage becomes a problem for everyone once the attic is stuffed.

Now I know why it’s called Oak Bay.

The most memorable card my mother ever gave me was very simple. On the front, a watercolour sketch of an acorn and encouragement to stand firm. “Remember,” the message read inside, “each mighty oak was once a nut that stood its ground.”

Mum was a riot.

Take the Fall

 

It’s pumpkin spice and everything nice. My favourite time of year is the fall. This weekend is especially precious, being Thanksgiving on Monday and me being grateful for nothing. The calendar is clear; I have four whole days to fill with whatever takes my fancy and right now I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than nothing.

Perhaps I sound ungrateful? I’m not. Truly, I’m not. Every day is stuffed with miracles, some too tiny to see and some so blatantly obvious that only a fool could deny them. Granted, the latter seem to appear less frequently, but the little ones, the ones I don’t always see, probably mean the most. They are the ones keeping everything in motion—and after the week I’ve had, I am ever so grateful for the passage of time!

It’s been a busy autumn despite COVID restrictions and working from home. Ter and I both have birthdays in the fall, and last week was particularly busy with appointments. I had some dental work done (more than expected, actually), Ter and I both had chiropractic treatments, and she did chauffeuring duty for a friend who had tests at the hospital on two separate days. And it’s only Friday!

So you see why a weekend of nothing is something for which to be grateful.

I could run my usual list: Ter, of course. My siblings and co-workers, my friends, my job in a pandemic where lots of folks lost theirs, my health (which is pretty good despite the daily bones), living in Canada rather than a few miles south of Canada. I’m even grateful for the petty bickering of politicians during our provincial election in contrast to the catastrophic numbskullery of the American presidential race. I dislike using a negative to promote the positive, but really? Compared to what the US populace is enduring, our troubles are puny indeed.

Yep, the fall is my favourite. We’ve had a good run of sun and high temperatures through the latter half of September into October, but now I’m ready for the rain. I want my hour back from April so it’s a bit lighter in the morning and the candles are lit earlier in the evening. I want fuzzy socks and big mugs of tea, fat winter novels and holidays specials on TV. The house smells of apples and cinnamon and, this Sunday, of stuffing!!

Spring is pretty, summer is lovely, winter is sleepy, but of the four seasons?

I’ll take the fall.

PS, I Love You

Ter loves the fall so much that if she was a Spice Girl, she’d be Pumpkin Spice.

Me, I like pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin custard, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin quick bread (GF, ovvvvv course), and the word itself. If I had a Mini, it would be Flyer orange with a vanity plate reading “PUMKIN”. As for the perennial autumn favourite, ye olde pumpkin spice latte/chai/what-have-you, I confess, it’s not the spice so much as its heralding of the season that brightens my world. Whether I order one or not, and it’s generally not, I’m always happy to welcome it when it comes.

So how was it that I opened my email on August 27 to find advisories from two of my regular coffee haunts proclaiming the return of the pumpkin spice latte? Make no mistake. I wanted the end of Summer 2018 more desperately than anyone, but even then, August 27??? Really, you money-grubbing corporate giants? You couldn’t wait for the Labour Day weekend before launching the harvest on a society still preparing for back to school? Even Mother Nature was in denial about the timing: who wants a warming spice drink when the park bench is hot beneath your butt and you’re still working on your tan? Surely pumpkin spice can wait until the first day of autumn!

And that’s (kind of) my point. The last day of summer, for me, falls not on the equinox in September, but on August 31. It doesn’t even matter if Labour Day happens after my birthday; September 1 is the first day of fall.

It happens almost overnight. Mornings dawn later, cool and crisp, yet the jacket you must wear to work is flung over your arm on the way home. The sky is a vibrant, burnished blue. The sun casts golden light on trees suddenly ablaze with colour. Twilight settles sooner, but gently, accompanied by the first whiff of wood smoke from neighbourhood chimneys. Apples scent the air where no apple trees exist – figure that one out! – and suddenly it’s too cold for your sandals. By the time the equinox arrives around the 22nd, we’re well into the autumnal groove ... but that groove does not, must not, begin until after August 31.

Boo Yah!

When I was a kid, it was all about the candy. I didn’t play dress up, so my costumes were culled from the clothes rack of least resistance. The family didn’t decorate (few families did, in those days) and we didn’t carve pumpkins, either. Once I outgrew trick or treating (i.e, when I could afford sweets year-round), the spookiest night of the year lost its appeal.

Then I met Ter. Some of her happiest childhood memories involve October 31. She carved pumpkins, she dressed up, she read Tales From the Crypt; if it was creepy, ghostly or chilling, she was right there. (Ironically, she has never read Stephen King.) The only Halloweeny tradition we had in common was candy and watching Charlie Brown.

Over our years together, she has carved an annual jack o’lantern and done a little home decorating. One year I got an idea for my own pumpkin, so now I carve one, as well. We decorate for fall, and slip in a few spookables as nod to the ghosts. We’ve always lived in an apartment, so we’ve never handed out candy – the one exception being 2011, when we were briefly the sole residents of a little cottage on a shady street. Ter dressed as a barefoot witch and happily doled out treats by the mittful to an assortment of neighbourhood kids. I’ll always remember tiny little Layla, a toddler princess on her first trick-or-treating expedition, who was so dazzled by Ter’s costume that she forgot to collect her candy; her dad had to turn her back around so Ter could dispense the goodies.

Last year, we did nothing. Real life was scarier than the occasion could ever be – we had just moved house for the second time in two years, I was recovering from the worst cold of my life (until this year), and poor Ter was coming down with it. We carved no pumpkins, left the decorations in the boxes, and sniffled and coughed our way through a single viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I did manage to attend a magic lantern show hosted by our (then) new neighbours, and had such a good time that we were delighted to be invited back for it again this year.

Ah, this year. We’re both healthy. We’re settled into our new home. The weather was clear and cool, and the magic lantern show awaited. We stopped down to let the neighbours know we were heading out on a short flânerie, but would be along for the show, then we did what I love to do best of all: we walked through the ’hood, criss-crossing the street, sidestepping packs of chirping children dressed as superheroes, princesses, ghosts, goblins, pirates, vampires, Darth Vader and Jedi knights, mummies, teddy bears, ballerinas, witches, everything but the kitchen sink. I brought along the Canon to test its night-shooting powers, but mostly we marvelled at how some folks get so into the occasion that they dress up their homes as much as themselves. Truly, every kid should hunt treats in an old Victorian neighbourhood.

 

 

 

 

People turn their yards into cemeteries. They park zombies on the porch. Skeletons hang in darkened windows. Tortured screams and maniacal laughter drift through the thickening fog (yep, this close to the ocean and tendrils were crawling). The pumpkin art is amazing. Ter took me to what she calls “the magic house” – a stonework studio as well as a residence. The artist who lives there has created a captivating world of light and spirit that has drawn her there on foot since we moved here. The yard last night was … well, I took more pictures there than everywhere else combined:

 

 

An hour later, and we were cozied in the dining room downstairs, sharing with friends and neighbours the annual magic lantern show – glass-painted slides on a projector from the 1850s with a hilarious play-by-play from the presenter and colour commentary from the audience. We laughed and talked and had a wonderful time with warm and wonderful people. Last year was a boo hoo. This year was a big boo yah!

Autumn Leaves

“the autumn leaves

drift by my window…”

No, they don’t. Around here, they zip by so fast that you wonder if you saw them at all. Or they get caught on the updraft and spiral skyward like snowflakes only to land light years from their tree of origin. I watched a flock of them on Saturday morning, dancing and spinning with such glee it was hard to grasp that the dance is of their death.

I pictured a tiny fragile leaf, nurtured all summer on sap and sunshine, clinging tenaciously to the branch despite the insistently tugging wind. I imagined the tree whispering, encouraging it to let go. So it does. The wind catches it, carries it high above the branch, above the tree itself, away on a dizzying gust, higher and higher, until it disappears from mortal sight. The bright yellow remains will land on a lawn or a sidewalk, but the leaf itself has moved on, through the clouds and up past the atmosphere to wherever leaves go when they die.

Only they don’t die. I doubt that leaves actually live. They are to a tree what hair is to a human. They grow and are shed, but they don’t feel anything. When a leaf is plucked before its time, it doesn’t say ouch. The tree does. The tree houses the infinite energy, rooted in the earth and tied to an annual cycle that mirrors the greater cycle of all creation.

The blaze of autumn colour is easily misinterpreted as death. It may signal the final hurrah for this round, but it’s far from over for the tree. It will sleep through the winter, then be reborn in the spring, sprouting new leaves, living another cycle … just as we do. We don’t end with our mortal winter. Our bright yellow remains are absorbed back into the earth, but the essence of each individual rises up past the atmosphere to a place beyond mortal vision, to sleep or dream or plan a return visit—but certainly not to die. What would be the point of that? Why would Nature establish a pattern of renewal and rebirth, and exclude us from the party? And how naïve are we to believe that we only get one crack at this mortality gig? I didn’t have to repeat third grade, but I did have to move up through elementary to junior high to high school before I learned enough to equip me for the next phase, and which proved insufficient, by the way. Doing is the best way to learn, so if we don’t learn it in this life, guess what? We repeat grade three. It took me twelve years of school to make adulthood. I reckon it should take at least twelve lifetimes to graduate to whatever comes next in the grand scheme of things.

That’s not to say I can goof off or not do my homework. I doubt there is a test between phases, but I suspect if I don’t pay attention now, I’ll get to the exit interview and go Crap! I was supposed to learn (insert virtue here)! So I’ll have to wedge the forgotten lesson into my course load for the next round.

Autumn is my favourite season of the year, so I’m optimistic that the autumn of my current existence will be the most fun yet. My toes are barely into it, but I know it’s here. My leaves are turning, for one thing, and the sap is starting to run a bit thin. I’m attracted to brighter colours, and bolder about wearing them, too. Now I get the saying, “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple.” Vivid colours are better suited to adorn maturity.

Just ask a tree.