seasons

I spent most of Sunday morning splitting up a white oak for winter firewood.

White oaks are native to our bioregion and they can grow huge and old. The primeval piedmont forests were full of them, and even though the old forests are now gone we still see big ones at the edges of old fields or in small out-of-the-way stands on somebody's protected property.

Yesterday it was 78 degrees with powdery blue skies. We walked on the Cottonwood Trail and saw the bloodroot's first bloom on our favorite March hillside. As an ephemeral early season wildflower, the bloodroot isn't really flashy. It's low to the ground. One white flower with a little yellow center accompanies the single, odd-shaped green leaf.  They live in colonies but you can almost lose their shy display among the leaf litter.

"There is a season, turn, turn, turn," the Byrds sang in 1965, quoting loosely from Ecclesiastes, "and a time for every purpose, unto heaven." Every year about this time I'm reminded of the appropriateness of this old Bible verse turned folk-rock poetic insight into the turning year as the first day of fall rolls around.

Last week it was 100 degrees for four days in a row, the first time since the upstate started keeping records in 1918. One day about 4 p.m. the mercury officially topped out at 105. People were suffering in the abnormal heat, so we were among the lucky ones. Our air conditioning (thank goodness for human ingenuity) was humming along, but a few times a day I wandered outside into the world so I could feel it in my face, on my body-historic heat.

Last year over spring break I loaded up my canoe and headed for Columbia. It was a trip I'll never forget. We spent five nights on the river. I really felt like Huck Finn setting out for the territories. This year I'm catching up on all the yard work I've put off. I've discovered that our low-maintenance yard becomes high-maintenance if I don't do any at all.

I’ve always been tuned into the big rolling wheel of the seasons. I hold a deep reverence for things that move in cycles (most things), and so take any opportunity I can direct attention to seasonal change. I’m always surprised when I realize that not everyone sees time as this deep cycle of millions of seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter without end) wheeling along from Big Bang to Eternity. Seasonal change is my baseline, my stock market, my creed, my insurance policy against meaninglessness and deep doubt.

We're officially not quite half-way between autumn equinox on September 21st and winter solstice on December 21st, but the "cold alert" has been sounding in our house the last week or so. We've had a frost, the leaves are falling, and the heat's even kicked on two or three times.