“Go, sit upon the lofty hill,
And turn your eyes around,
Where waving woods and waters wild
Do hymn an autumn sound.
The summer sun is faint on them—
The summer flowers depart—
Sit still— as all transform’d to stone,
Except your musing heart.”
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Another morning in the Southern Tier, the Corning Free Academy tolling eight, and the Corning Glass Works Tower sending its anachronistic whistle summoning workers back to the factories that have been gone for decades now.
And light rain sibilantly drenching the leaves and the rooftops. Cool and gray. Fall's in the air.
This morning I had the rare luxury of taking coffee with P on the front porch after breakfast--she had some sort of anesthesia meeting in the place of her first patient, so she could make a leisurely entrance a half-hour later than usual.
The morning conversation was anything but light, however--the criminalization of women and medical providers in the South and Whacky Mountain West in the wake of Dobbs, the dreadful erosion of the personal liberty that is the one great, original political legacy of this country, in favor of a communitarian freedom to oppress anyone with the misfortune of living near you. The Russian military debacle giving the lie to the notion that a liberal, diverse Western democracy cannot defend itself against the goons of the far right.
Krugman wrote on that point this morning in the NYT.
But in the midst of all this leaden political musing, I noticed a tree rising like a flame on the other side of Canfield Park, a harbinger of the change in seasons.
It's coming. You can feel the coolness in the air, still a little sticky with all the rain.
And the acorns are raining from the trees. I've never seen or heard anything quite like it, pattering like raindrops on the streets and sidewalks with every breeze and every voracious squirrel scampering among the branches.
Peg swept them off the sidewalk last night as she was talking to Laura on the phone (Laura probably oblivious to the fact that she, that is the iPhone, was tucked lovingly inside the left cup of Peg's brassiere so her hands would be free to handle the broom), but the street is still filled with the little buggers, rendering barefoot locomotion impossible.
This fall, our third, seems to have brought an acorn drop more robust than in years past. Or has it? Looking online, one can find articles answering the question of why there are so damned many more acorns this year in 2022. And 2021. And 2020. And 2019.
I guess it's always just so. We want to feel our experience at this moment is something unique, when it's really just more of the same.
The "Hell Hath No Fury" flag came down last night, Peg finally feeling she can let go of all that and exude a little more bonhomie. These folks on Southside Hill aren't the problem, after all.
Instead she brought home a Buffalo Bills flag, so we can join so many others here in western New York (I've figured out the term "upstate" is really too broad, and makes folks down below think we're talking about the Hudson Valley. When the Times talks about us up here, it's always "western New York") in expressing our affinity for the local NFL franchise, a plucky small-market team that punches above its weight, so much so in fact that many pick the Bills to win the Super Bowl this year. We'll see.
In the meantime, it's sort of the unofficial flag of this region, flying proudly from Tara.
And if it's a regional flag, the Bills banner stands for a lot more than just our local sellers of gladiatorial combat. It stands for the Underground Railroad. For the Seneca Convention and the birth of modern feminism in America. For Roycroft and the artisan movement. For people who'd rather go out after supper for ice cream than find themselves fighting in the parking lot of a honky tonk at 2 a.m. For green spaces not despoiled by tract homes. For live and let live. For raising really nice kids and making sure the poorest child in the school district has an iPad and an internet connection and a chance in this life not because it's economically expedient, but because it's fair.
This grand experiment in remote working and living may yet fall flat, but so far we're making it work. Along the way, to quote Jimmy Buffett, "I have found me a home".
And I've eschewed my second cup of coffee these days for a mid-morning Ovaltine. We bought the stuff a few weeks ago when the girls were over for an overnighter, but they turned up their noses at it and, well, as it happens I've loved Ovaltine since I was in footie pajamas. So why not? Maybe my blood pressure will settle back to normal without that extra double espresso.
Tugging the old BP the other way is a busy day crowned by a hearing via Zoom in PC in which an unscrupulous contractor is trying to get a judge to force a customer of his defective work to hand over the stock in a company she established several decades ago, because she's too broke to pay a judgment that never should've been entered in the first place. As Elbert Hubbard observed, law is one thing and justice quite another. It's my world, for now.
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