LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM

THE CURVE OF THE EARTH

By Barbara Tatham Johnson

The possibility of my annual flu shot languishes in a long list at my doctor’s office. I defeated an early cold with frequent hand washings and cups of elderberry tea. A chewable vitamin C tablet every morning provides protection, I like to think, against potential meetings with cold viruses in the busy months ahead.

Fall dandelions bloom in the meadow. Clumps of purple asters, flowering late amid a tattered heap of yellow frost-killed ferns, brighten the woods’ edge. The meadow’s May conflagration of vital green lies snuffed at the close of the growing season. Even the lush emerald shades of late summer regrowth after mowing is overtopped with leaves touched russet and yellow by frosts and freezes. On gray chill days in early autumn, when I look out on this landscape and sip my herbal tea, Thomas Hood’s lines come to mind.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

Then an Indian Summer day of sun and mild temperatures arrives. An entry in Henry David Thoreau’s Journal for November 1, 1855 reads, “ It is akin to sin to spend such a day in the house. The air is still and warm. This, too, is the recovery of the year—as if the year, having nearly or quite accomplished its work, and abandoning all design, were in a more favorable and poetic mood, and thought rushed in to fill the vacuum.” I am ready to discard the gloom of past days and take Thoreau’s advice to spend time outdoors on a morning when mildness and humidity combine to remind me of spring.

On my way to the pond, a series of high notes very much like those of a spring peeper startles me. I suspect the call is the tufted titmouse I’ve seen at the feeder, but the sound reaffirms my brighter mood. Snails and aquatic insects crowd the worn but mostly intact leaves of the little wild pond lily, water shield. A red dragonfly alights on a dry pile of bleached rush and grass stalks cut in early September. A wolf spider darts to cover at the base of the pile. She resembles the lone spiders that scurry about the woods’ paths when snow has finally melted in April, but a soft, high buzzy drone reminds me that field crickets remain active. Autumn lingers.

The small willows at the water’s edge bear next year’s twigs and bud growth. The twigs are wrapped in a thick, hairy velvet, and the buds, less obviously hairy, are tightly closed, prepared for the harshness of winter.

The old oak on the meadow’s edge holds on to many of its leaves. I notice the construction of a funnel-web spider in a crevice at the base of the trunk. The silken planes that form the doorstep of the gossamer tunnel, curving to darkness within the crack, holds bits of lichen and plant pieces that landed upon it with recent winds. The web’s hostess no longer waits for the movement of the unwary visitor on her porch. In recent weeks, most likely, sheltered by loose bark farther up the big oak’s trunk, she wrapped her disklike egg mass in layers of insulating silk, and died.

At the base of every tree leaf, visible in spring, is a tiny furrow or light green circle of tissue two cell layers thick. The layers become active in fall. One cell layer begins to disintegrate with the autumnal photoperiodic signal of shorter days. The shrinking cells weaken the connection of leaf to tree. Wind or each leaf’s weight completes the break. The second cell layer forms a corklike material that seals the scar left when a leaf falls from a twig and plugs the pipelines or tubes that carried water and nutrients to the leaf during the growing season.

I watch as an ash tree sheds its compound leaves that resemble plumes. As they fall, the leaves knock into attached leaves lower on the tree and dislodge them, sometimes singly, sometimes severally. They appear to be cascading feathers falling in slow motion and suggest the languid swooning of the tree into winter.

We talk of a season’s end, but what do we mean? Seasons are transitions more than endings—transitions with enough certitude to give more joy than dread. Most living things have strategies to endure winter. Some creatures nestle inside galls and cocoons, burrow deep in mud or winterize body fluid with natural antifreeze. Plants store vital energy in roots or contain a weatherproofing in their evergreen leaves.

Not long ago, we fixed the gap where the closed garage door does not touch flush with the concrete floor. Last year mice squeezed under the door and settled into the bird seed containers. They are probing, as I write, for another crack or gap we have not noticed. Tiny spiders, tucked away in the leaves of the Brussels sprout plants in the mistaken assumption the plants would stand in the garden all winter, scuttle to corners of my kitchen when I separate the sprouts from the stalks to cook them. Another spider has entered the house on firewood and reconstructs her loose but obvious webbing every time I dust the chimney corner.

This year, a week after the autumnal equinox, the earth passed in a direct line between the sun and the moon, and its shadow eclipsed the moon’s reflective brightness for more than an hour. As the arc of the earth’s edge projected on the moon’s emerging disk, the Boston Red Sox won the final game in the 2004 World Series and ended a painful eighty-six-year struggle to regain the title. My older brothers gathered me into the Red Sox fan club when I was a girl, and the warmth of satisfaction with the big win including the coincidence of a stirring astronomical event will last and last. Time rounds and finishes our yearnings nicely if we can wait long enough. 

 

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