The LBDs (little brown dogs), Mookie the cat of great fur, and I are jostling for position on the daybed as I try to write. Balancing a laptop on my legs with one dog alongside and the other at my feet, I remember just a month or two ago, out on the porch, we four would cuddle every evening on the old pink velvet couch reading and writing and just soaking in the soft air and sun to the soundtrack of songbirds. It is hard to beat summer in Vermont as the best season ever. We’re wet, but not too wet. Flowers love it here. We’re warm, but not hot. People thrive here. Waters are clean and swimmable. Kids, for the most part, run free.
Now, in late October, the furnace runs at night and the mice are moving into the kitchen leaving little brown trails. Walking into the autumn forest where the flowering plants have gone down into their roots or sent off seeds for next year, and tree leaves are drifting like fire flowers to the ground, it is now the season for ferns and mosses to shine.
Not all ferns like the cold; most die back. But the evergreen woodferns, the Dryopteris species, become dark green and prepare to be with us all winter. It as if they grow taller and yell “Hey, I am here, I’m not leaving.” Dryos is Greek for wood. Pteris is Greek for wing. Most ferns have pteris somewhere in their scientific name, as the Greeks thought of ferns as feather-like.
Another winter fern, a perennial evergreen, the Christmas fern was used around the holidays for decorations. If you look closely at the little fronds, they resemble stockings hung by the chimney.
The mosses are looking their finest right now. It’s wet and not too cold and sun is filtering through the trees. We bryophiliacs (my term for moss lovers) are an odd bunch, crawling around on the wet boulders, peering through loops. I suspect bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Gathering Mosses, would agree that once you have looked up close at a rose moss (Rhodobryum ontariense) or a pocket moss (Fissidens sp.) or an ostrich plume moss (Ptilium crista-castrensis), you will be forever changed.
Maybe fall is the best season, but then winter has snow and the LBDs, and I will begin every morning with a ski through the fields or if there is a lot of snow, up into the woods. Our studies will be of lichens on trees, birds at feeders, and tracks in the snow.
Spring needs no introduction. The anticipation of smells and colors temps us to demand sun and warmth and for the willows to burst with yellow, only to be smote with late cold spells, a shrinking woodpile, and the car sunk up to its axles, when all we wanted was some ice cream from Coburn’s to help with mud sadness. As wonderful as spring is when it behaves, I find it far too unruly to be the best season ever.
So that leads us back to summer again with the swimming and fresh vegetables and the pink couch. I don’t know. Maybe the best season ever is the one we are in right now, whenever that might be. Just being alive and tasting whatever nature happens to be serving up. That must be the best season. The alive one.