We shall need a fire tonight.
No, there’s no snow dusting leaves and branches yet, but by tomorrow night or Wednesday, that may well have changed. So, too, will the look of our trees, snow or no: Cold precipitation and freezing temperatures combine to turn the green to gold and brown, and send the leaves cascading fast to earth.
I said, a week or two ago now, that I doubted we would have much in the way of fall colors this year. I will be sad to be proven right; autumn is our favorite season, and we look forward to the foliage changes all year long. Even so, I never suspected that our first hard, deep freeze of the season would come on the eighth of September.
Here, the aspens are always the last turn, and ours are always the last in the area to go. It’s because we sit just a bit lower than the land across the highway, and while we are above one low snow line just down the road, this bit of land is sheltered in ways that the rest is not. In an ordinary year, the aspens remain green until October, and full of fiery gold and copper leaves until at least mid-November. But the leaves even on ours have been fading for some time now — not gold yet, just a paling green underlit with yellow tones.
Snow this week will be as devastating for them as for the corn and beans and squash.
There is little we can do, save harvest what is just ripe enough, cover the rest, hope for the best, and pray.
But this has been a year of prayer already, above and far beyond the norm, following on the heels of several successive such years. What has always been a way of life holds new urgency now.
Our elders and ancestors have always spoken, quietly and matter-of-factly, of prophecy, of great upheaval and change to come. It was not, as others would have you a believe, a psychological “response” to colonialism, for colonialism itself was similarly foretold. But knowledge, even foreknowledge, is insufficient to meet the depredations of overwhelming and purposeful evil.
We have a second chance now.
The world, as we are witnessing in real time, is transforming before our very eyes. It must, or die: Colonial humanity has made its survival impossible otherwise, and it will force all of humanity to transform with it. We are already long past the point of learning the new patterns; they have been thrust upon us, and if we have not figured out how to navigate them, they will carry us along on a current of catastrophic change that will spare no one based on virtue or wealth or authority, only those lucky enough to land at the other side.
The image above is proof enough of that. It is no mere glimpse of the future, but a record already of the past: our first snow of 2018, two years ago now. It was not this early, but it was more than early enough; the aspens were still as much green as gold, and the siskins were still present. This year, the siskins arrived in spring, perhaps possessed of enough premonitory powers to know that winter would come early here this year. In their place we have the warblers, including several species we have never seen here before. The errant goldfinch family is still here, too, having summered with us for the first time ever, and we have at least one new species of woodpecker, arrived earlier even than this week’s snow to come. They know that there is change upon the wind, change far greater than the usual shift of seasons, and they are seeking sanctuary now.
In this place, each season tends to become its own small world, a temporal plane of existence as discrete as it is temporary, near-fully contained within itself . . . or so it used to be. We are now seeing not so much overlap between seasons as a blurring of the lines altogether, a transgressing, anarchic traverse of weather and climate across and between.
Summer is by no means done with this place; according to the long-range forecast, the highs will return to the upper seventies next week. We shall probably have a week of temperatures ten degrees higher still in October.
But this day dawned cloudy and cold already, a chill wind barreling in from the north. A shift in seasons is already here, and it’s time to ready our world for winter.
~ Aji
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