Old gold song of the almost finished year

May Sarton's autumn & reading recommendations for the waning days of October

From left: Painting by Czene Béla, Autumn by Joan Mitchell, Katrien De Blauwer collage, Georgia O'Keeffe photographed by John Candelario at Ghost Ranch, 1939, Léon Spilliaert, Maison au crépuscule, 1921

The other morning I stood by the window and watched as the wind stripped the leaves from the oak tree. They weren’t falling, I thought, and no two leaves departed in the same manner. Some spun downward in a pirouette—with the grace of a ballerina or figure skater—and others rode on the wind as though they were caught in a wave at sea. Surfers and ghosts. Some hurried, others took their time. Like snowflakes, no two leaves were alike: their colour and texture and descent varied.

I found myself in a trance, thinking about the cycle of their short lives—beginning as buds in the spring, then all that time spent green, all those days in the sun. How the rain must have felt as it tickled their green bodies during summer storms. Not long ago they were brand new, and now they drop, one final dance. They’ll never know sky again.

Later, I thought of this poem by Mary Oliver as I continued to watch the leaves:

the black oaks fling
their bronze fruit
into all the pockets of the earth
    pock pock

they knock against the thresholds
the roof the sidewalk
fill the eaves
    the bottom line

of the old gold song
of the almost finished year

I’ve been on an Edith Wharton kick lately. First Summer, now Ghosts, a selection of short stories written between 1902 and the year of her death, 1937. As Halloween approaches, I’m reading one of her stories a day.

It is luckier for a ghost to be vividly imagined than dully “experienced”, Wharton writes in the collection’s introduction. And nobody knows better than a ghost how hard it is to put him or her into words shadowy yet transparent enough. It is, in fact, not easy to write a ghost-story… The other suggestion I can make is that the teller of supernatural tales should be well frightened in the telling.

Wharton’s scenes are masterful, her sentences oil-painting rich and laced with wit. There’s also something about her work that still feels current—or perhaps the terrors are universal: '“Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake, and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened ‘em you’d see something you dreaded and loathed?”

I’m finding myself underlining her descriptions—the warm light slender and smooth and hyacinthine—and entire paragraphs:

She lay staring at the dark windows, watching for the first glimmer of dawn. At last she saw a pale filter of daylight through the shutters. One by one the objects between the bed and the window recovered first their outline, then their bulk, and seemed to be stealthily regrouping themselves, after goodness knows what secret displacements during the night. Who that has lived in an old house could possibly believe that the furniture in it stays still all night?

Another reading recommendation for the waning days of October: