November, then and now

I’ve started re-reading entries in a paper journal from a very special time in my life, 1979-1983. I was teaching for the first time and living in Columbia, South Carolina, having recovered only recently from a dark period of depression. I was only 28, and life seemed limitless ahead of me. I was happy and overjoyed to be pursuing a long-buried, or perhaps ignored, dream. It didn’t last long, but it was a unique and treasured period of time when I look back all these decades later. I seemed to be another person, yet it’s clearly my younger self.

The first entry was from almost exactly a year ago, Nov. 28, 1979. I lived in a really nice apartment surrounded by woods. The woods in front of my place were filled with hickories. They seemed to thrive in this part of the state. They turned a golden yellow in early to mid-November each year, and I remember sitting on my balcony observing and savoring those intensely colored leaves. Few other trees there glowed with such Autumn brilliance. Oaks are my favorite trees, but since that November in 1979, hickories will always hold a special place in my heart.

November then was truly the height of Autumn. Reading that journal entry from 1979 gave me a shock of recognition of how similar my thoughts about the changing seasons were back then compared to now. I’ve always viewed the seasons quite metaphorically. My journal entries, both print and online over many years often talk about how the seasons affected my life and how, taken distinctly, they shed light on my state of mind, mood, outlook and hopes for the future. They also signified times of the year when I felt happiest or saddest.

I’ve been this way all my life — very sensitive to what each coming season would bring. I literally know that Spring has been a season of rebirth of after tragic illness. Summer and it’s heat in the Deep South where I grew up invariably evoke memories of summer vacations at the beach, mowing lawns, and brief but pleasurably sustained periods of freedom from school. Fall was always a more somber season, with the natural world retreating or drawing back in preparation for winter. The days were shorter and the nights longer. Colder weather was both welcomed and a bit feared because I’ve always preferred warmth over cold. Winter is when everything is stark and bare and we get glimpses of death in Nature that prefigure our owns deaths in our final winter of life.

This November has been the strangest ever, for me and I think for most people. The pandemic has reversed all the norms for this month. You know the story. Nothing has seemed like it was nine months ago. There is only one constant: Nature and the changing seasons.

This is what I wrote about late November 41 years ago. I think my prose was denser then compared to now when my writing is somewhat less filled with allusions and overly descriptive words. The passage of time seems to simplify things because, in my case, the dark clouds of depression that would often fill me with heaviness and questioning, no longer plague me, thankfully, and the pieces of the puzzle about myself and life are more securely fitting into place as the few remaining years pass.

From my journal, November 28, 1979

How suddenly it seems the winter trees beckon the cold season – the season of contrasts, stark tree branches against clear skies, their bold outlines tracing the most elegant network of reaching veins. I love this time of year primarily because it is such a surprising, invigorating season. Everything becomes the trees’ companion in the frame, a varied winter composition. Fall preceded it with an intermittent splashing of muted oranges and reds, then brilliant yellows everywhere. How anxiously I savored this color with the growing awareness that with each day farther into November it’s spectacle was diminished. Finally, the last crisp, brown dead leaves clinging tenaciously to branches, lost their grip in the slightest beckoning wind that called them on their way down to Earth to rest in the matted dankness of the earth which they eventually become themselves.

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