Monday, 6 November

Monday

6 November 2017

       — Yay, we’ve had our first frost!

Good Morning All, 

I am not entirely sure why November has always been a favorite month. Some of it, doubtless has to do with First Ice usually coming near the end of the month, when I could finally grab my skates, stick, and hockey gloves and head up to Hills Pond in the park, where my friend Timmy and I pretty much lived until Last Ice sometime in March.

But I think also the quiet sobriety of the month has always appealed to the Puritan outlook that provided the field-stone foundations of the world in which I spent my formative years. H.L. Mencken says: "Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” That may be less hyperbolic than we New Englanders would like to believe. As a child, I lived--in some inchoate--way in flight from that bleak vision, but that did not make it any less around me.

Also, and not least, November is the month that best understands grief. December is the month to bring closure and a blanket of pristine white snow, but November is the month that knows loss. The first couple of years after I lost Britta, I could in the company of November almost relax into my grief.

Up there in the hills of New Hampshire, Robert Frost knew all that far better and more articulately than I, as I hope the poem below (one I hope you have not seen before)  attests. I add just one side note: In line eight a grady is a loosely knitted woollen hat. 

My November Guest
Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grady
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so wryly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell he so,
And they are better for her praise.

              #########

Curiously enough, I had actually planned to tuck my modest November Sonnet in here, but realized it would be like offering you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich less than an hour after we’d finished Thanksgiving Dinner.

But definitely tomorrow!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: