Milkweed

The grass grows more slowly.  There’s plenty of rain, but the shorter, colder days inhibit growth.  The plants all seem to know it’s time to start conserving resources, to drastically reduce the energy output that goes into growth. For the maples, oaks, poplars and their deciduous kin there will be no more photosynthesis for months.  The leaves drift down to the earth arcing back and forth as they fall if there is no wind, and scudding down in rushes if there is. They carpet the earth, protecting seeds that will wait out the winter. The milkweed pods have burst open. They release their seed-bearing silks to the wind, sending out next year’s hope to lie dormant under the leaves, under the coming snow.

In the bare, harvested fields flocks of turkeys find grubs or seeds to fatten on for the hungry season to come. The small songbirds are nearly all gone, off to warmer places with more hours of sunlight. The crows seem to have gotten blacker, but that’s probably my imagination.

Deer are busy everywhere, fattening and mating, dangerously hard to see amid the browning grasses and dead goldenrod.  There was a small herd of them in Zen’s pasture this morning.  They ignored Charlie barking at them furiously from inside the house, but they heard the small sound of the back door opening when I let him out, and they were gone in a few great bounds.  I saw their white tails flying, and for a moment I thought it was a flock of lost seagulls.

I drive more carefully, having hit a deer in the spring and not wanting to hit another.  Scanning the road ahead on the way to Laurens this morning I saw a brown mound at the side of the road a ways up. It was motionless. Someone else had hit this deer.

The humans are getting ready for winter too. Neighbors are working to finish projects begun when it seemed like there was plenty of time, getting roofs finished on new garages, finishing the new porch, getting the outside painting done. Wood is chopped and stacked in great reassuring walls. At some houses the outside projects lie neglected.  Perhaps someone is sick.  Perhaps there is a passive aggressive standoff about work in an unhappy marriage. The time is short.  Anyone who is going to finish a project before winter needs to be about it now.  The plants and the other animals all know this.

The humans have their unique salute to the coming months of near death, Halloween decorations.  There are symbols of death on most of the lawns and porches, the skeletons, the ghosts, the gravestones, the grim reaper. Hah! We are not scared of death in the cold months ahead.  We capture it and poke fun of it. And we display the riches of the harvest, the pumpkins and corn, to prove that we have put by enough for the winter. We turn on stings of orange lights to defy the early dark evenings. In the cities and suburbs these Halloween rituals seem merely whimsical and fanciful.  But here in the countryside where winter brings a real threat of death to all living things, Halloween has a little of the flavor of whistling in the dark, making ourselves bold when we are perhaps a little worried about paying for the propane or getting the snow tires on.

Charlie and I walked out into a night full of fat, wet snowflakes tonight. It has stuck to the lawn furniture we haven’t taken in yet. It’s time.  Winter is coming. The milkweed seeds are burying themselves, ready to wait out the season of death, to wait for the days to get longer and warmer again.