Out in the Country, where folks live close to the soil, November is a time to rest and be thankful.
October has slipped away on feet of thistledown, and November now comes rustling down the mountain.
The autumn color ebbs, and the season turns from gold to gray.
And November is many things…
It is a time for sitting around the hearth fire and a time for walking down a country road in the starlight.
It’s a breath of apple cider, a gleam from a possum-hunter’s lantern, the belling of fox-hounds in the mid-watches of the night.
It’s a season of wind and rain, front and rime, and sometimes snow.
Its willows going from green to golden bronze.
It’s pumpkin in the pie and thoughts turning to mincemeat.
It’s a time for pulling up a rocking chair before the fire and a time for cracking nuts on the hearth.
It’s a time when the blue smell of wood smoke haunts the air and a time when violet twilight casts shadows over the cove.
It’s Indian summer sighing in the trees and snowy breath on every breeze.
It’s a cow-bell tinkling as the herd comes home and the lonesome, lonely crow of a rooster.
It’s grouse exploding underfoot and rocketing into a thicket.
It’s a wild turkey gobbling in the brush on a high hill.
It’s a squirrel with bushy tail and shoe-button eye standing on the trunk of an oak like a carved statue
It’s a rabbit hippety-hopping through the sere grass.
It’s the wind running its fingers through a field of broom-sedge.
Its holly and mountain ash, berry bright and firelight gay.
Its apples in the cellar, dried fruit in the pantry.
It’s a jug of molasses, a jar of sourwood honey, a crock of homemade kraut.
It’s a bouquet of dried onions above the kitchen stove, strings of red peppers, pods of okra, strips of dried pumpkin.
It’s a harvest of striped gourds and rainbow-colored ears of Indian corn.
It’s a candy roaster and green polka-dotted squash.
Its pumpkin whiskey and persimmon brandy, apple cider and fox grape wine.
It’s the smell of frost ripened maypops and gingerbread fresh from the oven.
It’s parched corn with butter and salt.
Its apple butter and pumpkin butter.
November is naked woods and meadows brown and sere.
Its frosty knuckles rapping at the door.
It’s a groundhog sniffing the wind and scurrying back to his den to sleep until spring.
It’s the creek whispering and the hemlock crooning.
It’s a fiddle tune and a homespun ballad.
It’s corncob tales around a stove at the country store.
But most of all, November out in the country is a time to rest and be thankful.