This is when the piercing power and sultry heat of the Sun abate, and gods send autumn rains, and flesh of men and women feels easier. – Hesiod

Oct. 18: The Moon enters its second quarter.

Oct. 25: The Leafturn Moon is full.

The Sun

The 23rd of October is Cross Quarter Day, the halfway mark between autumn equinox and winter solstice. The sun enters Scorpio at the same time. Within a little more than a month of equinox, the sun has traveled half the distance to winter. If it continued to move lower in the sky at that rate for another month, solstice would occur near Thanksgiving. As December approaches, however, the expansion of the night gradually slows, finally stopping abruptly before Christmas

Meteors in October

The Orionid Meteor Shower will occur in and around Orion in the early morning of Oct. 20-21.

The Weather

Rain passes through just one day in four. Highs in the 80s occur 5 percent of the time, 70s 30 percent, 60s 40 percent, 50s 25 percent. Morning lows reach the 30s or 40s half the years, and frost strikes one to two dawns out of 10.

The Natural Calendar

The inventory of autumn is rich in foliage and color, but the approach of late autumn draws down the density and texture of the canopy and strips away almost all the floral barriers to winter. In the same way that spring overcomes February and March with an accumulation of new growth, fall spreads across the summer with an accumulation of loss.

One enumeration of the season is the counting of what no longer holds, a counting of emptiness, cued only by memory and the more durable, woody scaffolding that binds the seasons:

Foliage of apple trees and crab apple trees, ginkgoes, sugar maples, trees of heaven, redbuds, black walnuts, catalpas, box elders, locusts, elms, birches, poplars, cottonwoods, peach trees, cherry trees, Osage, red oaks, white oaks, chinquapin oaks sycamores, red mulberries, sweet gums, silver maples, Japanese maples, white mulberry trees, beeches, magnolias, mock orange and silver olive shrubs, honeysuckles, Korean lilacs, quinces, privets, viburnums, burning bush, dogwoods, spireas, standard lilacs, gone or collapsing.

Silent mornings: no more robins chattering, no cardinal song, no dove song, no red-winged blackbird song, no grackle song, no cicada song, no katydid song, no cricket song.

Hollow milkweed pods, bare raspberry canes, bare blackberry canes, the leaves of hostas and stonecrop melted, innumerable flowers absent, and harvest complete – no wheat, soybeans, corn, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce.

Shapes of absent plums and peaches, pears and cherries, broccoli and lettuce, strawberries and mulberries, and the cotton of cottonwoods. Bare landscapes of corn, soybeans and wheat. Empty shells of milkweed and hosta, empty canes and branches, seeds eaten and stored, innumerable creatures gone, the harvest complete.

Faded colors of zinnias and snapdragons, sunflowers and coneflowers, goldenrod and purple ironweed, dahlias and tulips. Vanished fragrances of blossoms from roses and Japanese honeysuckles and azaleas and apple trees and mock orange and lilacs, from alyssum and moonflowers and jasmine. Missing calls of doves and red-winged blackbirds and robins, of toads and frogs, katydids and crickets and cicadas.

From a litany of creatures and events no longer present, one might unthink the world, take it down and let it rest. Emptiness is to space what silence is to sound. In the monastic embrace of the quiet, autumnal cell, I watch and listen, counting absences, replacing nothing.

Almanack Literature

Way Back Then: 

Summers on the Farm

By Charles Sutton, North Clarendon, Vt.

For many summers when I was in high school or college just after WWII, I worked on a small dairy farm not far from home.

The owner, James Nason, was “a gentleman farmer.” During the week he commuted to New York City where he had a top position with an advertising firm. He had three daughters – Jane, Carol and Sarah – any one of whom my parents had hoped either my brother Fred or I would someday marry. Never happened, even though I did time on the dance floor with Carol as urged by my parents.

Jim, as he liked to be called by us farm hands – two to four teenagers plus farm manager Dick Dunton – enjoyed being with us working the farm as often as he could, riding the Farmall tractor or a small bulldozer.

The farm included a dozen or so Guernsey cows and a large flock of chickens. There would sometimes be a horse or two, which his daughters looked after.

The Nasons had many friends including my parents who bought their milk, cream, butter, chickens and eggs, which were delivered by Dick to our homes.

We farm hands helped with the milking, pasteurizing and bottling the milk and cream, looked after the chickens from chicks to egg making or meat, and did the haying. This being an estate, we cut the grass and tended the gardens and cleaned an in-ground swimming pool.

I also learned how to process chickens: killing, defeathering them with a chicken plucking machine and eviscerating or dressing them out. Dick decided not to teach me how to caponize roosters, much to my relief. I’ll never forget my first week there, a time when “the rookie” had to be broken in.

One of my very first jobs was to scrape the cows’ bottoms which were always caked dirty especially when the cows started eating spring green grasses. I passed that test and went on to the next.

I was excited about learning to drive the tractor and using its immense forklift. One day my fellow workers asked if I would like to hook up the manure spreader and do its job on a field. The spreader was filled with moist cow plops from the barn and chicken manure, which we collected daily from drop trays beneath their roosts.

My first run down the field went fine, but on the return trip this “rookie” was taught a lesson. I didn’t realize it was so windy. Soon I was also spread with the bits and chunks of manure riding out the wind. The other farm hands thought this was pretty funny.

But the experience had a happy ending. We who looked after a large in-ground pool were allowed to have a quick dip there in the late afternoon provided we showered first and got out before our boss Jim got home. And when Jim did get home, he would invite us into his office in the barn to offer us a drink of beer or whiskey. Pretty grown-up stuff for teenage boys!