First Day of Fall

The summer is gone, and it will never return. Until next year. But that summer will not be the same as this one was, and nothing is ever the same, but there is nothing new under the sun, whether a summer sun or a winter one, and the full moon waters the earth with its silver light tonight.

Silver light tonight. Mrs. Orr and I sat and talked for a long time about the forces that are prodding this country and this world down certain paths. It’s difficult to talk about these things, but it has ever been difficult to deliberately choose to defy evil. Hamlet defied augury; Mrs. Orr and I defy the reeking evil that spurs the current events on. Let it come if it will. We will prove to be more than a match than the border of Texas apparently is. We are two small, insignificant peasants in this empire. But we are unafraid.

The day started mild and somewhat muggy. By mid-morning, the rains sluiced through the mountains and towed in a cold front, and the temperatures dropped steadily through the day. By tomorrow, the highs will be in the 70s and the lows in the 40s. Quiet cold, quiet cold, I have an eternal and undying love of quiet cold. I talk and write of the evil of inversion, but in things climate-related, I am an inverted man. Almost everyone prefers the warmth of spring and summer and the loose freedom these seasons provide. But I am ever watchful and I see that the warm seasons are noisy and vulgar. Yes, the flowers bloom and the bees are busy and the life-giving vegetables thrive and the hummingbirds swing through the farm’s spaces and we can sit outside for hours on end and the daylight stretches out before us like increased lines of credit….but. But.. noise. The noise of humans, with the appalling music they inflict on other people, and the garbage-clothes with their noisy visual trash, designed to assault the senses, and the Nordic bodies baked into beef-jerkiness so as to follow the ever-mocking influencers, and the filling of parks and forests with people who should be mown down like extras in a war movie.

The cold hurts me now. I awake on chilly mornings with my hands twisted into claws, with my knees pounding like rotten teeth, with my shoulders as gritty as ground glass. And I accept the pain, I revel in it. Because it is quiet outside. The cold quietens things down, just as the coming snow muffles the sounds of the woods and the lanes that slice through them. And so, painful as it is, I welcome the cold. I will take the pain in the ice season over the mellowness of my joints in the clattering openness of the warm months. When it is summer, I cannot light a candle without feeling the assault of the flame on my already-damp face. In the trough of winter, the almond-sized flame atop the carrot-sized candle can warm both my hands and my soul. And no noise can touch me there, and neither politician nor priest can command me to snuff out the true, pure light of the blueberry-and-lemon flame that spreads its light across the pages of the missal, that soothes the ice-burn in my knuckles, that dances in the pupils of my blue and Christian eyes.

Ah….here I am only in mid-September and talking as if puffs of frost are issuing out of my mouth. Not yet. No, not yet.

But they will. The cold will come. This is the first day of fall, and I embrace the sweet suffering of cold and arthritic pain that will reduce my prayers to whispers, even as it drives me and my family to one single room of our farmhouse, sitting around a safe-sized box of iron with blazing wood hissing and singing in its belly.

Can you tell that I am smiling even as I put these words before you?

~ S.K. Orr