Mike Macartney's Blog - Posts Tagged "autumn"
September
"September Song" is the title of a chapter in a book from childhood that always stuck in my mind. Maybe it is because September is such a wonderful month. School is starting again in the last hot and tired days of summer. Frost lingers at the edges just before dawn. The tall grass is dry and dusty, and the trees have weary leaves, a few are starting to drop. Sometimes September is a long month, with the early look of fall in that faded blue sky, just enough indigo left to not yet be October. There are promises of Indian Summer to come and just the touch of red in summer’s apples, to be picked starting at the end of the month. The local apples, eaten warm from the neighborhood trees, are really the best that there are. A great huge yellow moon comes one evening.
The borrowing is from an author no one reads much anymore, Robert Ruark. He wrote in the space somewhere between Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. His writing was much about hunting with his grandfather in North Carolina or hunting birds in Africa or the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. He died a bitter and unhappy drunk in Spain cursing America and the change that happened when he turned to look back at an imagined past perfect. His books and writing were music of a fashion, echoing bitter cold dawns waiting for ducks with a shotgun, or the sound that September makes in the American psyche circa mid 20th century. It was contemporary with the bottled golden elixir that Ray Bradbury sold or the drone of flies in an empty post apocalyptic diner imagined by Rod Serling, for your consideration.
In my September yard the Mexican Sunflowers are wild and past youth, a ragged bush of green and orange. Wasps and flies visit the tray of water on the bench next to them all day long. At other times there mourning doves sit quietly beside the water or sparrows flit and dance along the rim to drink. A squirrel drops down every now and then from the fence highway. Behind the sunflowers is buried an old orange cat that used to sit on the roof and watch the neighborhood. Everybody all around knew the cat and some fed it. It expired one day in a back alley between houses. My kids and the neighbor kids buried it there by the sunflower planter. Five sparrows are also in the ground with it. When I started to trim a bush in front of the house in the spring there was a nest in it with two little birds. When they jumped down one night learning to fly a cat got them and tore their heads off. The same thing happened to a small tree by the back window with three more birds killed the same way, after I waited a month before trimming the tree so they would be gone first.
Last night there was a skunk outside the window. Skunk smell has never really bothered me and it went on its way before I went to sleep. There is a raccoon that looks at you from a storm drain one street over from its nest in the dry leaves at the bottom. The neighborhood is lousy with crows now in the mornings. Glittering black eyes in black faces watching everything carefully from all the lawns.
On a hike in a park above Silicon Valley a while back a bobcat dropped in to walk on the path 75 yards in front. It did not like my walking behind it and faded off into the dry weeds beside the trail. From the top of the hill I saw two coyotes were bouncing along the trail below, next to an old abandoned apricot orchard. They hopped a few feet off the trail and vanished as if they never were.
My younger son rides horses and is a groom at a big stable in Palo Alto. I can remember fall nights sitting on a chair on the porch of the lesson office, watching a lesson and having a raccoon scurry under my chair. Another time the horses got loose at night and ran like thunder down the dirt road in the pitch black, like heavy trucks thudding by and shaking the ground. The deer come down from the neighborhood hills in the dusk there and sit on the dressage ring ground to watch tiny children jump 1200-pound quadrupeds over white rails.
Last afternoon a big hawk glided over the trees up above Stanford University when I went to pick up my son for dinner. Another one came up from below and turned upside down so they could clash talons together, and then each went off to sit at the very topmost bits of two redwood trees. His two big dogs, one 100 lb. Labrador - Great Dane and one goofy Doberman, both from rescues, were particularly loud barkers when I came up.
We, the species with the big brain, are very close to unwinding the chemical helix that makes all the rest and us. It is only a short step then to learn to knit our own codes to make process all life. We struggle with our teeming numbers and what that means to a crowded and troubled planet that becomes less and less interesting, less and less special every day. Many hope that the big brain will make fast ships again, to take us first to Mars, then to everywhere else in the heavens, to escape ourselves.
The leaving for some place better in the mind, means crossing a vast darkness. We would sail in a wind of bits of atoms and the glare of harsh rays that can burn the life right out of you. It means to move our weak and fragile selves through nothing save the breath of stars, to land somewhere where we will build the first outposts of extraterrestrial humanity, where things will be better.
The question is not if we can go out to other worlds, or how we would do it, or even why. The real question is: “will we be happy there without September?”
The borrowing is from an author no one reads much anymore, Robert Ruark. He wrote in the space somewhere between Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. His writing was much about hunting with his grandfather in North Carolina or hunting birds in Africa or the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. He died a bitter and unhappy drunk in Spain cursing America and the change that happened when he turned to look back at an imagined past perfect. His books and writing were music of a fashion, echoing bitter cold dawns waiting for ducks with a shotgun, or the sound that September makes in the American psyche circa mid 20th century. It was contemporary with the bottled golden elixir that Ray Bradbury sold or the drone of flies in an empty post apocalyptic diner imagined by Rod Serling, for your consideration.
In my September yard the Mexican Sunflowers are wild and past youth, a ragged bush of green and orange. Wasps and flies visit the tray of water on the bench next to them all day long. At other times there mourning doves sit quietly beside the water or sparrows flit and dance along the rim to drink. A squirrel drops down every now and then from the fence highway. Behind the sunflowers is buried an old orange cat that used to sit on the roof and watch the neighborhood. Everybody all around knew the cat and some fed it. It expired one day in a back alley between houses. My kids and the neighbor kids buried it there by the sunflower planter. Five sparrows are also in the ground with it. When I started to trim a bush in front of the house in the spring there was a nest in it with two little birds. When they jumped down one night learning to fly a cat got them and tore their heads off. The same thing happened to a small tree by the back window with three more birds killed the same way, after I waited a month before trimming the tree so they would be gone first.
Last night there was a skunk outside the window. Skunk smell has never really bothered me and it went on its way before I went to sleep. There is a raccoon that looks at you from a storm drain one street over from its nest in the dry leaves at the bottom. The neighborhood is lousy with crows now in the mornings. Glittering black eyes in black faces watching everything carefully from all the lawns.
On a hike in a park above Silicon Valley a while back a bobcat dropped in to walk on the path 75 yards in front. It did not like my walking behind it and faded off into the dry weeds beside the trail. From the top of the hill I saw two coyotes were bouncing along the trail below, next to an old abandoned apricot orchard. They hopped a few feet off the trail and vanished as if they never were.
My younger son rides horses and is a groom at a big stable in Palo Alto. I can remember fall nights sitting on a chair on the porch of the lesson office, watching a lesson and having a raccoon scurry under my chair. Another time the horses got loose at night and ran like thunder down the dirt road in the pitch black, like heavy trucks thudding by and shaking the ground. The deer come down from the neighborhood hills in the dusk there and sit on the dressage ring ground to watch tiny children jump 1200-pound quadrupeds over white rails.
Last afternoon a big hawk glided over the trees up above Stanford University when I went to pick up my son for dinner. Another one came up from below and turned upside down so they could clash talons together, and then each went off to sit at the very topmost bits of two redwood trees. His two big dogs, one 100 lb. Labrador - Great Dane and one goofy Doberman, both from rescues, were particularly loud barkers when I came up.
We, the species with the big brain, are very close to unwinding the chemical helix that makes all the rest and us. It is only a short step then to learn to knit our own codes to make process all life. We struggle with our teeming numbers and what that means to a crowded and troubled planet that becomes less and less interesting, less and less special every day. Many hope that the big brain will make fast ships again, to take us first to Mars, then to everywhere else in the heavens, to escape ourselves.
The leaving for some place better in the mind, means crossing a vast darkness. We would sail in a wind of bits of atoms and the glare of harsh rays that can burn the life right out of you. It means to move our weak and fragile selves through nothing save the breath of stars, to land somewhere where we will build the first outposts of extraterrestrial humanity, where things will be better.
The question is not if we can go out to other worlds, or how we would do it, or even why. The real question is: “will we be happy there without September?”
