Senses of Autumn, Senses of Home

I begin my seasonal holiday reflections with what is happening outside, inside my house, inside my heart. I don’t tend to begin with myths and tales. But often I get there.

This week, it seems we have really turned the corner. Maybe it’s because I’ve been expecting Midautumn for weeks because I have a class coming up. Or maybe it’s because my wife is so adamant that autumn begins with the wheat harvest at Lammas.

Or maybe it’s only the weather.

It’s been cool here in Portland, OR, and misty in that Pacific Northwest way. The sky is gray and there’s been some real rain, but mostly just that sense of water droplets suspended just enough to get onto my glasses. The ivy is turning colors on the wall of a building down the street. The sedum and the hydrangea are both turning russety colors. The squirrel who just ran across my back fence had a humorously full face.

And the sun.

Well, the sun is slanting differently now. Yes, yes, of course it slants differently every day. But now magic hour, that golden time of perfect photography feels longer, richer, and more beautiful than it possibly can be in summer.

It is the time when things are truly beginning to darken, and soon, it feels soon, it will be the time of the ancestors.

Six Weeks Ahead

But I am six weeks ahead of myself.

But only six weeks! Six weeks until the Veil’s thinning reaches its softest, most gossamer place.

This week, though, is the autumnal equinox. Sometimes called Mabon, it is the fruit harvest. It is the apples, the cider, the grapes and the wine. It is the season of cider presses and giant copper kettles. It is the season of feet stomping grapes on decorated Greek amphorae.

Speaking of all this fruit, I drank a Japanese wine a couple of weeks ago that tasted…tasted…tasted like something I couldn’t quite place.

And then I did place it.

I remembered. When I was young, really young, younger than 10, I used to play hide and seek in the grape vineyard, under the grape arbors and along the rows of grape vines.

And while we hid, from one another, while we snuck around the rows, we ate the grapes. Some were red and some were purple. All of them had that thin dust covering them. We would split the skins and pop the sweet insides into our mouths.

The Japanese wine tasted like that. Sweet, grapey, and effervescent with seltzer. Grapey like my childhood. Sweet like wearing sweatshirts and sneakers and playing until Kelly’s mom rang the great iron bell in the front yard, calling her to family dinner and the rest of us to go home to our own.

I could write a whole post on the magical landscape of Kelly’s family’s land, and maybe someday I will. But there are other smells, other senses, other places of autumn, or as it is where I come from, fall. There are other things I need to say.

Cinnamon and Fulfillment

In “In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver writes about the woods “giving off the fragrance / of cinnamon and fulfillment.” It is words like these that remind me of other times of my childhood.

The fragrance / of cinnamon and fulfillment.

That fragrance makes me think of the woods in fall on Tussey Mountain. That fragrance makes me think of my father and cutting wood. That fragrance makes me think of all the deciduous woods I have been in. In Pennsylvania. In New York. Even in Oregon and Washington, before the northern forests turn to conifers.

It is the time when animals are just beginning to sniff the air for cold, for slowness, for caves and holes and dead-and-down trees.

Cinnamon and fulfillment are the smells of the land of Four Quarters Farm, the place I went month after month for twelve years. Of pine needle beds under the hemlocks.

Cinnamon and fulfillment are the smells of home places.

And finally, home, for me during all these times of Mabon memory, was a rambling old house with a wood stove my father named, Vesta. Yes, even then, ancient deities were a part of life in my household. (He also painted the front door of every house we lived in “Chinese red” for good luck. So, you know…)

Behind that woodstove was a slab of sealed asbestos. It was regulation—you know, you had to have brick or asbestos or Goddess-knows-what-else to protect the walls of your house. Anyway.

Anyway, my parents painted the asbestos with chalkboard paint, and my father drew on it, especially in autumn. One year it said, “Dum potes aridum compone lignum”—gather dry firewood while ye may. One year it was a huorn, or maybe an Ent, hard to say. But it’s eyes were scary and looked huornish to me.

My point about the woodstove, though, is that they were all over our little town. Woodstoves and a few fireplaces. But mostly woodstoves. Vesta, bless Her, heated most of our big house.

And so, walking up the lane and down the alley or up by the road to go home, the air was full of the smell, not of cinnamon, but certainly of fulfillment. Of home.

The Season of Home

Grapes the taste. Cinnamon and woodsmoke the smells. Warm cider the drink.

These are the senses of the autumnal equinox for me. And they are some of the most vivid, powerful sense memories I have. Joined with the beginning of the university year, my going back to school, chasing one another on bikes as darkness came earlier, these memories of a huorn in the living room, chainsaws in the woods, cider my mother mulled (with actual, not metaphorical cinnamon) on the stove called Vesta, and grapes in childhood games…these are home.

Do you live someplace that has a distinct autumn? And what is it like there? How do things change in the high desert when the sunlight changes? What about in the mountains? I hear in Colorado they’re having berry harvests, whiles the berries are long past, here where I live now.

What is it like when the winds change where you live? What is it like on the beaches where you look out on the rivers, on the lakes, on the bigger-than-big sea?

What is it like? What are the smells and tastes and sounds of home at autumn for you? And when will the smells of this place become the smells of home for me?

As the equinox comes around, this Thursday the 22^nd, I invite you to consider the nature of autumn where you are. How is the light changing where you are? How does it slant through the windows? And consider going to my site, The Way of the River to see what we’re up to starting on the equinox. Fire has a special place in the dark, and we’re going to explore that place in a special course, The Elemental Wisdom of Fire. For four Thursdays, fire will be our guide in the growing darkness. By the time we finish in October, it will nearly be Samhain, and the dark will surely be upon us.

What do you hope to gather in the slowly darkening days?

So many blessings…