seasons
the third letter + poem
3 November 2024
Dear Jaclyn,
Everything depends on the season here. The smells and sounds, the textures and colors, and most of all: the quality of light. My kitchen sink window overlooks our garden to the west. My writing desk overlooks our orchard to the east. I spend a lot of time at both, and these views afford me plenty of occasion to watch the sun roll across the horizon, north in fall, south in spring. Daylight swells and dwindles with the music of the spheres.
Maples run with sap only during a specific temperature window in February-March. Wild asparagus and morel mushrooms are regulated to May. Strawberries and rhubarb are jammed (literally) in June. Sweet corn is only fresh in August, crisp apples and buttery squash ripen in September and October. Nothing compares to eating the earth’s bounty in the very season it erupts, right off the stalk. Then again, hunters and fishers aren’t held back by the cold, and neither are the bakers and brewers.
Spring is drenched with the fragrance of lilacs and apple blossoms. Summer humidity carries the sweetness of chamomile and clover. Fall harvest dust is followed by damp leaf-mold. Winter woodsmoke is the scent of coziest content, especially if a log of walnut is burning in the Jotul. Wood-knockers hammer hollow trees year round. Pheasants shriek and turkeys chortle from the fields in fall. Sandhill cranes usher summer in and out with their echoing trills. Frogsong drowns the world in spring and early summer. Cicada arias signal summer sliding to a close; they leave their papery-crisp casements clinging to bark in tribute. There are the seasons of fireflies and dragonflies; also of ticks. (But then I guess some people like horror movies, too?) I bless the orb-weaver that catches gnats next to the sink, and curse the mosquitoes that drive me indoors, but I wonder at the monarch migration fluttering silently through the glade at twilight, winging like a flickering canopy of flames toward warmer climes in secret forests thousands of miles away.
The magisk1 of hoar frost and rime ice often come around the turn of the year, December or January. Deep freezes settle in, blizzards blaze, sundogs ignite the sky. After solstice passes the days lengthen towards summer like a slow yawn. Without the dark, how would we welcome the light? Without the cold, who would bask in warmth? In early summer dew daubs every blade of grass, dawn tendrils thread through the mist and bathe everything in a gauzy glow. The air is drinkable as green returns. You never saw such a green before.
P.S. I’m writing a poem a day for the month of November. Follow along on Instagram if you like, but I’ll post right here on Sundays. Today I tried my hand at a burning haibun, which is prose writing (this week’s letter) followed by a blackout haiku.
magisk - see Virgil Wander by Leif Enger