I opened a bedroom window the other night at bedtime in anticipation of a nice cool night under a waxing moon. As expected, a waft of cool air flowed in, and on it, clearly discernible was the unmistakable sweet aroma of burning hardwood. One of my neighbors had started up his stove against the coming cold of the wee hours.
The scent struck on two levels. At the conscious one, it reminded me that the heating season is almost upon us again. At the unconscious level, it mixed sadness at the end of beautiful green summer with the thrill of weather perfectly attuned to the human body (mine, anyway).
My very first night and day in New England, in September of 1950 at boarding school, were like that. The morning fog cut visibility to less than one hundred feet; yet by the start of my 8 o’clock Latin class, the sun shone brightly through the big old windows of the classroom. I’m afraid I noticed the weather, the big, ripply old window glass, and Mr. L’Hommedieu’s blue porcelain watch fob with the large blue “Y” more than the agricolaetoiling in the fields.
It has been ever thus, this incipient sadness at the dying of the light and the cooling of the earth. At midsummer, the sun has moved far enough north that it peeks around the northwest corner of the house and floods the office here on the backside. The thermometer tacked on the back porch post creeps us to 90 degrees. Today, only a thin sliver of light struck the inside of the back wall at 6 o’clock, and the temperature had already begun to drop toward the 57 degrees predicted for tonight.
With the bedroom window open again, I’ll be able to control the heat under the covers by rolling up tight and breathing occasionally into the space around my ribs. The days of sleeping on top of a towel with the ceiling fan going are over for this year — and in spite of the depression threatened by deepening darkness — I can’t say that I miss them.
I have difficulty imagining living in a different, tropical climate, where the days follow each other almost indistinguishably. I cherish living among people who dwell here by either heritage or choice and have to get ready, one way or another, for the coming winter. President Calvin Coolidge, traveling through Vermont in September 1928, one year after the catastrophic flood that wiped out so many, roads, bridges, homes, and farms, called them “a race of pioneers.” I’m not sure that many of them would sit still for that; still, there is a strong vein of implied virtue in cutting, hauling, bucking up, splitting, and stacking winter firewood.
Old guys especially take pride in the appearance of their woodsheds. Two of them who once lived across the road from each other with facing woodsheds, competed so fiercely to be the better that the town announced a competition, with the winner to be chosen by the selectmen.
Tarps went up immediately in front of the sheds, with the old-timers toiling away behind them in secret. On judgment day, the selectmen made their choice. The losing woodpiler cried, “How could he beat me? I used a miter box and ruler to cut mine.”
“Yep, that may be so,” said the selectmen, “But Silas did, too. And then he sanded and varnished the ends.”
The summer people are slowly trickling southward. Once they’re gone, mostly after Labor Day, there’ll be about a two-week lull — a lovely quiet time of scurrying squirrels and migrating geese — before the birches and soft maples begin to turn. Then it’ll be Katie-bar-the-door as the tsunamis of leaf peepers flood north in their thousands, now armed with the latest intelligence about the location of “peak color” on a cell phone app. There won’t be an open room in any hostelry or a highway unclogged by cars with plates from away.
A couple of years ago Bea and I foolishly (I was the fool; she doesn’t live here) thought to breeze one Saturday through Smugglers Notch in the roadster. Ha! We couldn’t even get off the interstate at the Waterbury exit. It was nice to have a house (and stove) to retreat to.
The sun sets now before 8 o’clock, which’ll be the case ’till next year. There’s enough good dry ash and maple in the cellar for two winters, and more on the back porch for the little parlor stove. But anyone who’s lived here for long would never be foolish enough to hook his thumbs in his vest and smugly consider his ducks in a row. There’s a lot more cold air up there where these little hints are coming from.
Willem Lange’s A Yankee Notebook appears weekly in the Valley News. He can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.