Everyday vs Writerly Stuff

 It's snowing thirty miles north of us.

Yes, it's only halfway through the month of October, and southern Iowa is getting snow. We're just getting the greyest skies imaginable, with a bit of fog and a touch of wind. I'm ready for snow -- heck, I'm ready for anything with my cup of ginger tea and my cranking weather radio because I'm a Midwesterner.

I want to write about more than the weather, however. Because this blog is often a warm-up for my other writing (such as the novel I'll be writing for NaNo), I tend to write off the top of my head, which involves:

1) Weather

2) Setting

3) Where my head is at

4) What I've been up to

Maybe that's okay. I've put up a writers' blog where I'm talking about more writerly stuff at lleachie.wixsite.com/laurenleachsteffens . I don't write as often there because I don't write writerly things every day. I will be mobilizing that as my writers' website very soon.

But I should tell you that The Kringle Conspiracy is available for pre-order on Amazon. Type in my full name, and you should be able to find it!

Deep October

 So, October's a bit warm right now. We sat on the patio at the local steakhouse for dinner last night and it was only a tiny bit cold in my shirt sleeves. Even when the cold front comes in Thursday, our highs are going to be in the seventies.

Even though the days are gloriously warm even as the leaves turn, I strangely look forward to the snap in the air, the frost, the chill rain under black skies.  Especially the rain. 

I had a cloak, a heavy and billowy thing of burgundy tweed with a lining of velour. There was nothing better than that for an autumn evening, especially if it was misting. The cloak had a bonnet hood with it to keep off the rain. I still have the cloak, but it desperately needs cleaning from hanging on a basement rack and there's rips in the lining. And I feel a little self-conscious wearing it now, to be honest. It's a quite spectacular cloak.

I look forward to the withered grasses, the brown, sere roadsides, the grey skies. I await the chill evenings, the dreary rainstorms, the crisp orange and brown mornings, the touch of frost. Summer has been with us too long.

The Power of Small Rituals

 

 Sunday morning, and our Sunday ritual once again -- classical music and coffee. No newspaper, although we pull up the news on the Internet. Two of our cats linger downstairs -- the big Chuckie with the tiny meow, and the loud and insistent calico Girly-Girl. Me-Me and Chloe the kitten are scrapping it out upstairs. 

We don't play anything but classical music till afternoon, and then we're likely to play jazz. (Except today, when we will break the "no carols till Thanksgiving rule and play my playlist for Kringle in the Night through for tweaks.) 

Meanwhile, the scent in the room is Silver Birch, a very autumnal scent. Outside, there's one maple tree with leaves starting to turn red to remind us that the seasons do pass even when we're too busy to look.

I'm thinking about my ritual to commemorate my book being published. I have a Moonman C1 Christmas Edition fountain pen coming in the mail, hopefully before the first of November. I will fill it with red ink and use it for Christmas things. 

Rituals, as I have said before, are important. They help mark the seasons, the days, the milestones. They help commemorate the everyday and the phenomenal. They help with closure and with focus, with devotion and with loss. Don't ignore the power of small rituals.

A Snippet of Autumn

Yesterday afternoon, I looked out the window to see a maple tree striped with fire. 

Astronomical autumn came quickly. Soon, leaves will tumble and be brushed into piles smelling of dust and bark. Evenings will grow dark sooner, and the motif will change from flip-flops and seashells to pumpkins and dried corn stalks. It's time to reap the harvest and prepare to settle in our homes to wait for winter. Our schedules will not allow us that rest, but our bodies long for it as the days get shorter.

I will feel the temperatures drop, and I will wear a jacket against the chill. I will drink hot, smoky tea with cream to chase away the cold. I will feel the change of the seasons, even though my summer was spent inside and working due to the COVID-19. I will wish for a huge leaf pile, one that will accommodate my big, old bones. 

Soon, the snap in the air says. Soon.

Snow. In October.

Snow. In October.

We had flurries last night here in northwest Missouri, just enough to notice, not enough to coat the ground. I wouldn't complain about that, but we are getting a freezing rain/snow of up to three inches precipitation tomorrow, just in time for Halloween. 

Between the unseasonably warm weather and the snow, we have had about two weeks of autumn. I demand an explanation.

There's an old adage that cautions against complaining about the weather, but snow. In October. I think this is an extenuating circumstance.

The snow will melt, leaving our lawns drab, sodden leaves and dun grasses. Because this is Missouri, home of the four seasons in one day, we may even see temperatures in the sixties -- or, who knows, the seventies -- before December. But the damage has been done. November will be a child of winter, not autumn, and we will be tired of snow before the year is out. 

Halloween is Thursday, right smack in the middle of the snow. Maybe I should go as a snowman.

Another Homecoming and the Words that Come With It

The leaves have finally turned, orange and red and brown, dazzling the campus for Homecoming. I remain convinced that Homecoming is the remnant of a pagan ritual that captures parts of the harvest festivals and part of the sacrificial king (in the guise of a football game.) This would make pumpkin spice latte a sacrament, and I'm not sure I want to go that far.

It's been a long time since I've thought this way, of the seasons of the year yielding a mythology we live by. I had no reason not to think this way, given that both Quakers and Episcopalians can skew romantic about the seasons, and rare individuals of each even call themselves pagan. In fact, the liturgical Christian traditions follow a liturgy of seasons, and mystical Christian traditions offer a glimpse of the movement of the year as well.

When I was younger, I was what I called a kitchen witch, making my own rituals in solitude, following the seasons of the year. This faded with my years as a professor, even though my religious life didn't give me the hands-on relationship with life that I wanted. (Correction: Membership in the Religious Society of Friends did, but I've been 90 miles from Meeting for 21 years. The Episcopal Church put me too far from the feeling of sacredness.)

We need our rituals, whether dressed Wiccan or pagan or Christian (or one of the many other religions we profess). Those who have stripped ourselves of rituals because they're "pagan" lose our moorings to the seasons and to the earth. Those without rituals that speak to them frantically try to rip rituals from others by brandishing the word "Satanic", or create a mockery of ritual that worships hatred, bullying, and totalitarianism (MAGA rallies, I'm looking at you.)

I think about what Autumn says to me -- golden and bittersweet, rejoicing at the leaves and wrapping up against the chill. Saying goodbye (Les's death still resonates) and hugging the last of harvest to my arms. Snuggling with cats -- always snuggling with cats. 

Hoping it makes for good poetry now that I vow not letting work become everything.

I was born for autumn

I'm feeling in the mood for autumn. Meterological fall started August 31, but it hasn't felt like fall lately given the 85+ degree weather, and astronomical fall won't be for a couple more days.

Today, it's raining outside, which puts me more in mind of fall. I like fall best because it is a season of introspection, of putting away the revelry of summer and taking stock of how many leaves I've seen fall in my life. The crisp mornings with scarlet and orange maple against the clear blue sky recall perfect moments, while the dark, icy rain reminds me of past travails.

I was born in autumn, born for autumn. It suits my dramatic side, the part of me who wants a black cape to walk through the whispering leaves. It suits the writer in me who wants to write of the dark corners of the psyche. 

I will welcome autumn with a cup of cider or a glass of brandy, toasting the harvest and the darkening nights.

Autumn is a great time to find oneself.

Autumn is a great time to find oneself.

Autumns force one into introspection, during those chill October drizzles that remind us that we have a home to go to, whether physical or spiritual or familial. Fog obscures the familiar and forces us to face the feelings of navigating in a strange world. Thunderstorms -- the glory of October thunderstorms! -- inform us that sometimes anger clears the air.

The indolent fantasies of summer -- the beach books, the margaritas, the vacations where we swear we'll move to San Francisco to start a coffeehouse or Florida to retire -- fade in the wild emotions of autumn, where idyllic sunlight through golden leaves becomes the crystalline silence of frost or the bluster of a wind that knocks down piles of the golden leaves now fallen.

Autumn is my season. I want to be the blustering wind, the crystalline silence, the fierce storm. I want to broadcast my emotions and make others feel, flush them out of the hiding places of their summer, make them see the richness of the fiery leaves even as they spiral around us in the gust.

I want to be autumn, for it's a great time to find oneself.

The Romance of the Storm

It's a grey day outside == the temperature is dropping into the high thirties, and the leaves blow off the trees to make sodden yellow piles in my backyard. Any beauty autumn normally has seems lost in the grey sky, in the mist, in the cold.

It is because of this that autumn is the most romantic time in the world. Not so much because it's tempting to go inside and cuddle with someone over jazz and hot chocolate, but because fall is tempestuous, and asks us to meet it wearing nothing but our starkest selves.

In spring, we hide behind our bright faces, wearing our delight like lambskin, meeting cute and gamboling through light conversations. In summer we discover the needs of our bodies and souls, and we don't know how to articulate them.

In fall, we are scraped raw by the freshly sharp, cold wind. We are stripped from artifice like the denuded trees outdoors.  We have nothing but ourselves to offer. We are cold and hungry, shivering and in need.

There is nothing more romantic than the meeting of self to self without the trappings of status, prejudice, and superficial rules.

Autumn is not for you

Autumn is not for you, my misty faun —
The primroses long dead, sunflowers gone.
I walk alone on the last fair autumn night,
With memories seldom held to light.
Before too long, you’ll fade into the rain
While autumn and its penances remain.

Autumn

I woke this morning, and something in the air had changed. For one thing, a chill had appeared and I had clutched extra blankets to myself in the night. The sun shone with a subtle golden aura that presaged what would come -- the glorious russets of maple leaves, the burnished brown of oaks, the golden rain of locust trees, the delicate yellow of gingkos.

Autumn will always be my favorite season. The pagans I know believe that it is ruled by Herne, a powerfully built, dark protector of the forest, the Horned God. It's easy for me to believe, as autumn broods in its mists and rainstorms, in-between its golden sun and clear, cool nights.

Autumn, even in its fiery glory, whispers: This will end soon. This will end in white, and cold, and you will huddle in your homes waiting for the world to renew again, as it has before.

Melancholy October

The clock on my computer reads 6 AM, and there's no sign of light through the window.  The first day of autumn was a month ago, and the leaves of the trees I cannot see in the opaqueness of pre-dawn have shifted to brilliant russet and orange and yellow.

Fall breaks my heart, the way it wrings out the greatest beauty of the leaves before they die and blow away in spicy, earthy drifts. The rustle of leaf piles, the days and nights of rain from delicate sprinkles to sibilant showers to pounding gullywashers speak the truth of autumn, that it's all about the last hurrah before the earth sleeps through the winter.

Flocks of starlings, like sooty leaves tumbled in a wind, wheel across the sky in everchanging patterns -- billows grown big, then small; gathering for their migration south. The unprepossessing slate-colored juncos in their grey and white move in and outnumber the year-round drab sparrows. The cardinals stay through the winter, flashing red against the snow; seeing one seems like a promise that summer will come.

It is time to tuck away my summer fancies for those things that stay, that last through the winter. I will invite those friends to my hearth to drink hot chocolate and tell stories; I will welcome them as my own.

PS: Light and dark

You believe you know me because we have laughed together on a golden afternoon, as the first of autumn's leaves turn gold and tumble lazily.

You do not know me until you have walked with me through sodden leaves on a night where the wind whips sleet in your face and white-hot forks of lightning bleed into your vision. Here, I am a witch, the child of the storm; I stand on a hill singing to the maelstrom.

You’ve only seen me laugh. I laugh because I’ve screamed; I smile because I’ve raged; I champion the wounded because I’ve been beaten. I rejoice because I have survived.

You cannot honor my light without accepting my darkness.