Everyone agrees we’ve never had finer weather. The canopy is orange and red, all aflame. It’s true that as you get older (if you’re doing it right, as they say), your attention becomes less inward-focused and more absorbed in the external world — the paintbox colors of the foliage, the weather, the behavior of the trees (waving their branches and saying “hello”), the mysterious configurations of birds in flight (moving in geometries and shifting their massed formations as if by telepathy). Horse chestnut husks fall to the ground and their spikes, like a small landmine, get stuck in the soles of your sneakers as you patrol the neighborhood looking up at the sky to see what the clouds are doing.
Late last night, the second night of November — a bit discombobulated about what the time might be, with the clocks just set back an hour — I found myself Googling the word “Samhain.” I didn’t know how to pronounce it and wanted to know. It’s “sow-in,” an ancient pagan Celtic festival around the time of Halloween that celebrates the dark half of the year. Believers used fire and spark to push back against threatening forces of the supernatural: dark magic and, I suppose, witches and fairies. They performed rituals or walked in pagan processions after nightfall with torches, and lighted bonfires.
The last time I had a bonfire in my yard was at Halloween 2020, which stands in memory as our last good Halloween. It was Covid times and I lighted a pyre of dry logs in a large aluminum tub on the brick pathway in front of our house; the moms stood in a ritual circle around it at a proper “social distance” drinking hot cider spiked with rum and cloves while the children ran screaming toward Dayton Lane and Main Street. Later, we all walked under the moonlight back behind Town Pond, and crept stealthily like so many silent shades over the golf-cart path that carries Maidstone Club members over the golf course in summer.
Obviously, we humans have some ancient, atavistic attachment to the smell of wood smoke. It makes us feel some kind of way (as the kids say). Cozy? Safe? A longing? A whiff of the magical?
It is firewood season. My kids and I lived in Canada for some years and our house in Nova Scotia was heated entirely by a cheerful, stout-bellied, black iron wood-burning stove. We stuffed its belly with logs last thing before bed and it glowed and kept the house warm until we woke up again. By morning, all that was left in the chamber was white ash and red embers, and we shoved it full again. I was married then to my now-ex-husband, who is a boatbuilder and has an intimate knowledge of wood. He offered all sorts of opinions on the qualities of different kinds of firewood: “White oak is hard as the hinges of hell,” he would say. “It has medullary rays,” he would say, that radiated out from the center of the log, making it easier to split.
My fireplace here on Edwards Lane is not so practical, and not nearly so hard-working. Where the Nova Scotia woodstove chugged and huffed out heat like an old-time steam engine, my East Hampton fireplace sighs in ladylike vapors, the ghost of Miss Havisham, exhausted with age. It’s a very old brick fireplace — dating to the 18th century, I think, when this part of the house was a silversmith’s shop — and quite shallow and wide. It draws fairly well but doesn’t give off much heat, and the house doesn’t hold it. I tried to warm the house by stacking my fireplace with log after log after log — laboriously carried over three feet of snow from the distant woodpile behind the kitchen on a red plastic sled — during the massive blizzard last February, but it didn’t work. Jack Frost carved icy figures on the window panes.
After dinner, I have been leaving the house alone for a little ramble under the moon, without my dog — who, due to the fine weather, has been treated lately to daily walks on the bay beach. I’m not above making caramel apples for myself, alone in the house, and since I have already walked the dog elsewhere I can go out after I’ve eaten my caramel apple to stroll about unencumbered.
This week, I can report, there have been far fewer cars on the road. I walk past my favorite tree, the very round beech on Mill Hill. (I’m told this favorite beech will soon catch beech leaf disease and die. But so will we all, I guess.) The traffic at any other time of year is intense on Main Street, even at night; it is difficult to safely cross Buell Lane or Mill Hill Lane on foot after dark, because cars come shooting around the corner like bullets sprayed from a machine gun. But last night I was able to count to 20 (one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand . . .) without a single car in sight, all the way from the traffic light at Woods Lane to the corner by the Reutershan parking lot entrance. I heard the wind and the leaves rustling. I only passed one other pedestrian. It was a blond woman speedwalking in an orange vest while talking loudly in a language that I think sounded like Dutch. She came toward me on the sidewalk swiftly, her hands free of a cellphone; she must have been speaking into a mouthpiece or AirPods. I could sense her competitive nature. After she passed me, she got to the corner, then turned on her heels and speedwalked past me again going the other direction, while I ambled slowly past the Maidstone inn, peering in through the glass to see if there was anyone seated for dinner service. (There was not.)
Now that generative A.I. is here, I think we’re all going to become much more appreciative of the — I don’t know what to call it — the experiential world, the world of senses. How thin, how frail (at least so far) is the representation of the autumn world in the hallucinatory (and, I must say, genuinely nightmarish) visions of A.I. For the last two months, we have been assailed with A.I.-generated, cheesy “harvest festival” illustrations of pumpkins and scarecrows and candy corn. Children don’t even eat candy corn any longer. In the age of A.I., even that is no longer a taste (more gummy than sweet) or a fragrance (the atmosphere in the bottom of a waxed-paper bag with a ghost on it), but is reduced to just the flattest image: three stripes (yellow, orange, white). Everything is honed down by A.I. to the simplest cliche.
Well, I wonder. Maybe being outside in the real world will soon be understood to be the greatest privilege and the greatest luxury. It will be enjoyed by the poorest of us here on Earth, and the richest. Perhaps the great middle classes will be the ones imprisoned in the artificial reality of the virtually generated world. But we shall see, I guess.
When I was a kid, from about the age of 6 to about 13, I had rather a melancholy frame of mind and I found it not just depressing but somehow existentially disturbing that autumn would roll around again so relentlessly every year. I found the sight of the dry, dying leaves and the branches going bare to be so sad that it upset my daily routine. Obviously, this was the inevitable developmental experience of a child learning that everything — trees, parents, dogs, goldfish, dahlia bouquets, even favorite bicycles — grows old and dies. But now that I’m older, and my birthday is coming toward me this month, I don’t see autumn that way at all. It isn’t depressing or disturbing. I’m all in on enjoying the fall, because at least it’s not winter yet.