I left for New York in the fog and mist, and then an hour later, I drove into low, dark stratus clouds, and the wind came in strong from the northeast against me. The colors of middle autumn that would have been so rich and bright against the blue sky seemed dull and ominous to me. I looked for murmurations of starlings spinning together over the brown fields, but there seemed to be no life at all in the landscape. Traffic was loud and heavy all the way across Ohio and Pennsylvania.
When I stopped to rest at a deserted roadside parking area out of the wind and away from the highway and the rush of trucks and cars, I felt a relief in the quiet, surrounded by soft grasses speckled with thin-leafed buttercups, daisies with floppy petals, purple heal-all, white clovers, red clovers a few hawkweeds and dandelions.
This was such a plain and ordinary habitat, its sparse vegetation a simple and finite retreat, unplanted and haphazard, that, for some reason, separated me from the complexities and risks of the long trip head, and from some vague sadness that I must have caught from leaving home, and from all the clouds and chill and from the falling leaves and from the dying Johnson grass and prickly teasel of the rougher and wilder freeway borders.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I'll be back again next week with notes for the third week of middle fall. In the meantime, find a shelter from the craziness of the hectic world.
Poor Will’s Almanack for 2018 is now available. Order yours from Amazon, or, for an autographed copy, order from www.poorwillsalmanack.com. And you can purchase my book, Home is the Prime Meridian: Essays on Time and Place and Spirit, from the same sites. The essay collection contains many of the selections heard on this radio segment.
