Rabbit Brush

Rabbit brush in bloom:

pinon yields beneath the axe,

leaves still air perfumed.

After the season of chili roasting that you can taste on the air, the roar of propane flames in every grocery store parking lot, and just before the morning air is smudged with the subtle perfume of pinon fires heaped in hearths against the gathering cold, rabbit brush goes to bloom.  Then I know it is fall, time to get in a load of firewood (we burn around three cords every winter), climb to the roof to play chimney sweep, compost the gardens for the deep sleep ahead.  

Fall has always been my favorite season.  Maybe it's the quality of the light, more suffused with yellow, the hard cut shadows from low-angled sun.  Or perhaps it's the extra layer in the morning, not quite necessary yet, but welcome somehow, particularly for a man never terribly comfortable with his shirt off (hell, I never even liked short sleeves, spending the summer cruising Cape Cod in my '68 Cougar, doing arm presses against the door panel to add badly need heft to my skinny arms).  But mostly just the change of pace as everything slowed a bit around me, and my step moved up-tempo a notch in contra-indication.  

Last night Deborah and I went to an art opening at the Stables in Taos, for a show titled Seed 2.  All of the work is related in some manner to seeds and germination, or at least with a vegetal hint.  But my favorite part was the interactive children's exhibit in the back where all things seed were on display.  They had a grouping of popular products from Quaker Oats to soy sauce, each accompanied by a small pile of the seeds from which they originated (which had the side benefit of highlighting how little food makes it into so much packaging).  On a table were bottles of different seeds to be shaken and listened to for timbre and sonority.  Or the mesh topped containers of ground spices to be smelled and (potentially) identified.  Overall the work this year was high quality and beautifully executed, and it was good to visit with my friend Linda Michel-Cassidy who was invited this year (wish I had brought my camera!).  

Intriguing to me the idea that the dissolution of Fall contains within it the engines of regeneration: the hollyhocks will reincarnate someday along the adobe wall, the mexican hat will find a way back to days of burgundy and saffron waving in the sun, and the last of the marigolds defiant still the against the creeping chill will slumber through the coming snow dreaming of germination.  

Mostly in Fall I remember my days back east, when the sugar maples would explode in orange and red, hillsides glowed in golden rod, and the last of the queen anne's lace cast finely filigreed shadows as they shivered in the stiffening wind.  Or long walks on abandoned Cape Cod beaches, a lone fisherman or two on Craigville Beach still casting for blues, as the afternoon shadows lengthened and a sudden gust carried the scents of seaweed and salt, driving chill sand against the windshield of my car already pitted by so many similar seasons.  And the tides washed away all my sins.  

Morning awaits, as does wood to be stacked, some to be split.  Somewhere nearby I hear a maul calling my name.