The Days are Rolling Slow

reflections on the passing seasons

Autumn field, Dundee, NY. Oct. 2024

Last night, Nick and I went on a walk up our favorite hill, the one that we’ve tried to walk every night since moving here in June. The last few weeks it’s been harder to make it up to the line of willow trees beyond the wheat field. Part of the reason is how early the sun sets now, and because of this there’s too much traffic, making it a little scarier walking up a country road. When we got here, the sun was setting around 9 o’clock. Now it’s setting before seven.

In the past four months, we’ve been able to watch the ever-changing procession of wild flowers and herbs grow in the ditches between the fields and the roads. Last night, most of the goldenrod had bloomed and either looked blighted and brown, or had grown bearded and soft, like a tiny cluster of dandelion fluff.

Amazingly, in little pockets, there were still some stalks of goldenrod blooming, and as the dusk drew closer, some late-working bees were looking for as many surviving blossoms as they could find.

A bumblebee on late blooming goldenrod, Oct. 2024.

The wheat field was harvested in July. In August, it was plowed, but I don’t think anything was sown. Now green grass and weeds are growing in abundance where the yellow wheat once bowed its head.

We have only been here four months, and yet so much has happened in that short time. Both within ourselves, and within the subtle shifts of nature, the birds we see on our walks, the flowers that come and go. In June, the ditches were choked with an abundance of flowers, now they are thin and dry. Once the pond at the foot of the willow trees was full, now it is only a muddy patch.

It reminds me of the song, “Turning Toward the Morning” by Gordon Bok, a verse of which I’ll quote here:

Now October’s growing thin

And November’s coming home;

You’ll be thinking of the season

And the sad things that you’ve seen,

And you hear that old wind walking,

Hear him singing high and thin

You could swear he’s out there singing

Of your sorrow.

Winter is coming. But with it, I am sure, will be new things to notice. Perhaps more subtle things. I want to be able to see and appreciate these quiet shifts in the land and in my heart as the colder weather draws near.