This past weekend, I drove toward the Ohio River through the full range of early fall, its different sub-seasons depending on how the soybeans or corn or goldenrod or tobacco, harvests were complete or pending, blended with the undergrowth and tree line. The specific time of year hinged on the number of fragile ashes or box elders or sumacs along the roadsides, or the advance of the deep violet Virginia creeper, or the number of catalpas, tulip trees, sycamores, crab apples, sweet gums, cottonwoods, locusts, hackberries, redbuds or early maples and pears and oaks in any given location, September revealing itself only partially as a function of the slant of the Earth, each species following its own calendar.
I uncovered micro-seasons of place from mile to mile that showed me topographies of rainfall in the sun or the green of the roadside grass or the sharp rust of vegetation killed by drought, the variety of habitat within a range of 100 miles suggesting the wild complexity of just a few hours in one autumn day.
My moods rose and fell while each yard, field and woodlot opened temporal and spatial cross section after cross section, created a process of definition and redefinition in which the borders of this particular day continually shifted and were transformed, as though the inevitability of winter were irrelevant, as though I were captured by a game in which natural history became simply a matter of belief and disposition.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with more notes on the seasons. In the meantime, watch the early leaf turn in the landscape turn the the season toward Middle Fall.
