Two, two and a half weeks ago, after three+ months of mostly gray, rainy days, the weather gods did a 180, suddenly showering us with sunshine and user-friendly temperatures. A turnabout that has quickly become the norm -- classic late summer conditions, warm days giving way to cold nights, mornings fogbound, sunlight slowly burning through. (With a rhythm of several warm days broken by a sudden cold snap, temperatures slowly recovering after a night near freezing and a morning of October-like cold.) There's a bittersweet edge to all this, coming so late in the season -- autumn has been edging its way in, the days growing noticeably shorter. The first small splashes of color appeared three to four weeks ago -- during this last week they've spread, some trees have begun letting go of leaves. Autumn is settling in, behind it hovers the long cold season.
(Bittersweet? The end of August is upon us, a part of me is stunned and ready to freak the fuck out at the stealthy speed with which the days have skidded past. If I stay in the moment and do what needs to be done, one step at a time, I'm okay. If not, my little brain gets going like an unhappy, hyperactive mixmaster, spinning out unhelpful nonsense.)
I've found myself driving backroads, tooling through woods, farmland, small villages. The car windows open, the tangy, sour odor of manure drifting in now and then with the breeze. I found my chosen route closed for roadwork during a drive several days back, sending me down a route I'd never traveled, me grabbing the local road map to figure out where in hell I was, where I wanted to go. Followed one road to a gravel road the map showed becoming a track that trailed through backcountry for a mile or so, finally joining up with another gravel road. Swung onto the gravel road, passing a hilltop farm, moving through green land empty of homes, coming upon another farm, the road curving around it out of view.
Around that bend the road forked, the division to the left becoming the farm's driveway, petering out in the front yard. The division to the right became dirt, then mud, two rough-looking ruts divided by overgrown grass that passed through long, deep-looking pools of water before disappearing between trees and out of sight. Hardly even qualified as a track, and its condition did not give me a good feeling. The trees crowded both sides of it, a glance along showed no clearance for turning around. A fast stop to knock on the door of the house and inquire about the condition of the track produced no response. Tried again. Still nothing. I stepped away from the door, called out a hello, no one answered apart from chickadees in a nearby tree. Decided not to risk a trip into those trees, hung about for a few minutes instead taking photos before following the gravel road back out to other, more secure ways home.
The work I've been hacking away at here has progressed enough (and the weather has become user-friendly enough) that I've begun tackling tasks outside beyond the normal warm-weather outdoors labor. Scraping paint, the first step in repainting one wall of the small kinda-barn -- much bigger than a shed, much smaller than your run-of-the-mill barn, home to horses in an earlier incarnation -- across the yard from the house.
Scraping paint. This is where I begin to see the value of extra hands, and I note once again how smoothly my entire social network has managed to avoid coming up to visit during this time of ongoing calorie burning.
It has its transcendent side though: stepping out the kitchen door into sunlight and warm air, into the music of late season insect music (crickets and their cousins, hidden away in the grass). I bring no radio, just walk to the barn, the view across the valley opening up to one side as I move away from the house, the trees of the woods towering off across the gravel road to the other side, blue sky arching overhead. The sound of my footsteps in the grass, the sound of scraper on wood, the constant background soundtrack music of the late summer insect world. I like it. Don't care so much for doing the work solo (which leads to taking long, frequent breaks). But being outside in northern Vermont's version of late summer? Amazing.
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Yesterday evening, northern Vermont:
España, te echo de menos
rws 6:43 PM [+]
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