Cabin Journal

Autumn Light

There’s a small period of time now, between summer and winter, when the light is as clear as it will ever be. It’s the interlude between when all the trees and bushes have shed their leaves but before the snow starts to cover everything.

Without the sunlight being filtered by the leaves from the aspens or willows, or refracted by snow, the light is so dazzling it makes me stop in my tracks. Could the bark of the aspen really be that purely white? Could the sky really be that deep blue? Maybe it’s my sunglasses intensifying the color. But no, it’s the lack of humidity, no moisture in the air to make the landscape fuzzy. The winds help, too, scouring the air of any possible dust or pollution.

 

In the fields, every blade and seed head of the crisp brown plants seems illuminated. Even the cabins in Meeker Park seem to glow from within as the sunlight hits them directly.

It’s the kind of light that makes me feel I could stride up the gray granite face of Mount Meeker, still snowless. The kind of light that makes me want to walk across the umber fields, all the way down to the plains, the grass crunching under my feet. The kind of light that buoys me, keeps me supported no matter what’s going on in the rest of the world.

On the pond (above), a group of mallards relax in this light, taking refuge in this safe spot—a small island that shelters them from coyotes or other predators. I envy their comfort, their total absorption in this sunlit moment. Any day now, the pond will start to freeze, and the ducks will have to find refuge elsewhere, at a lower elevation or farther south.

But for now, we’ll all revel in this light, so honest and stripped of any pretense that it crumples your heart a bit.  

Letting Go

After a summer of chaos, life moving too swiftly for me to absorb everything, I’m happy to  settle down now as the seasons change. Although I love summer, a part of me is happy to see it leave. All summer long, I’ve been traveling, including to Illinois to see my mother, who was struggling with dementia and other disabilities that were making her life almost unendurable.

In between trips (including a fun, if hectic, one to Scotland), as much as I could I sought to enjoy summer in the mountains—the three brief months here when life flourishes and the landscape erupts with color: the lime green of the aspens that saturate the valley bottoms and the wildflowers that cover the rocky ground with every possible hue—this year in numbers I’ve rarely seen because of the wet spring. The rivers and creeks are replenished with snowmelt, and the summer birds —house wrens, swallows, hummingbirds—fill the air with their trills and swoops.

I want to absorb it all, because it goes by so quickly. There’s only a short amount of time to get my kayak out on Lily Lake before the water and air gets too cold; a few months to hike to my favorite alpine lakes—Mills, Isabelle—before they start to freeze. There’s hardly enough time to get my fill of the frenetic chipmunks and curious ground squirrels that pose on the front porch.

 

 

But now, as the aspens put on their final show before last week’s snowstorm, and after my mother’s death and funeral, I appreciate more strongly than usual how life is slowly being released: the green chlorophyll receding from the aspen, willows and grasses, as the days get shorter and the sunlight decreases, leaving behind golden leaves and  yellowing grasses. All the summer birds have left for warmer climates, and the ground squirrels have retreated into their winter dens, soon to be followed by the chipmunks and bears (but hopefully not in the same dens).

The rivers have shrunk back, leaving exposed sandy and rocky shorelines. Only the tall brown skeletons of the angelica—what’s left of summer's thick reddish stalks and white flowers—are proof that wildflowers once covered the valley. Here at the cabin, everything starts to fade away, life turning inward in preparation for winter, as the landscape returns to its brown and beige complexion.

When the cold front moved in last week, winds tore not just leaves but whole branches off trees. As snow and cold descended, the snow dampens all sounds, and silences the churning of the summer chaos. Life retreats, as it does every year, and I work to accept that. There’s peace to be found at the end of summer, as at the end of a life—a release from suffering.

The last of the aspen leaves that have been clinging to the trees let go, slowly descend to the cold, hard ground, where they will crumble into dirt and become part of the earth. Let the snow cover and put an end to all the turmoil. I can hear it in the wind: Let go, let go, let go. Let the stillness descend.