The brisk wind off the bay had a whiff of change — the timing between summer and autumn can catch you off-guard. The maple leaves are not yet turning, the acorns and apples still plumping on the branch, but there is a palpable tipping point and the onset of an autumnal rhythm.
The farmers have cut and baled their hay and tucked in the barns. My lawn clamors for a final pass with the mower. Or, let it go? It won’t grow much longer. But is the woodpile sufficient for a whole winter’s heat? That’s the tipping point: ripening versus retreat to hibernation. I’m in no hurry to be mounting the studded snow tires.
There is a certain kind of day, however, when you sense that you’ve reached the seasonal outer buoy — when the next tack had better be down the reach, under a small jib, toward home and snug harbor.
Are we there yet?
To the poet John Keats, autumn contained a second harvest and plentiful blossoming — “mellow fruitfulness,” he called it — to the discerning eye, not just a segue to winter or the shutdown of summer. Autumn, Keats says, is for gleaners, those blueberry pickers who find the sweetest midnight-blue fruit around the granite outcroppings, like bears storing up for the winter.
Keats was a gleaner, too — not so much of what was actually there, as what he felt about what was there. Keats gleaned poems from his own ripeness for inspiration, growth and beauty. His autumn of bounty was as much an interior season as it was the mellowing of the English countryside.
Poets are society’s gleaners, scooping up thoughtful morsels left in the furrow after the haste of more prosaic harvesters. You need to walk slowly and look carefully to see fruit in unexpected places.
I detect a few lingering feelings of the season just past. I want to be a gleaner of summer, not autumn. I haven’t fully appreciated the thoughts and rhythms of summer. That outer buoy marks a further channel to navigate — to open communications with oneself and sail into romantic waters.
Alas, there are too many choppy currents that throng what we allow for slack time — a compulsion to be going, doing, making — as if only outward industry is achievement. Because it is the season to pause, summer confronts us with the interstices of life. Time elongates, allowing us to see pockets of thought that were blurred as we trotted briskly past. Gazing too far in the distance makes us steer as the crow flies. By meandering we savor the subtleties of our progress: the perfume of spruce, the grasshoppers in the tomato plants, the crows caucusing in the white pines, the perfect webs the spiders are knitting in the grasses.
And Keats would approve of my hammock under the oaks. “Mowing can wait,” he would say.
Tomorrow morning — make wild blueberry muffins. Soon enough we will make time for apple picking. But in a hammock, on a late summer or early autumn evening, Keats and I can just listen to the “gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”
Todd R. Nelson is a writer in Penobscot.
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