Brown November
An autumn pause, a visit to Sheridan, and treasuring a quiet color and time
But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them. - L.M. Montgomery
There’s some breathing room this month, I’ve found in recent years. November brings a marked decline in autumn’s brilliance, a post-Hallowtide relief from the vivid fall glory and masque. Below the gray clouds and amidst shivering, skittering leaves, life seems a little subdued, too. Despite what you see in stores and on screens right now, we’ve still got a significant chunk of time until we even hit December, let alone Christmas. That’s another reason I like outdoor November—a place where I can’t ignore the browns, the impressive solitude of autumn’s decline. “So dull and dark are the November days,” writes the poet John Clare. “The lazy mist high up the evening curled, and now the morn quite hides in the smoke and haze; the place we occupy seems all the world.”
As a child, I wanted to skip most of November. It can be bleak, the trees losing the last of their withered leaves, harsh and skeletal in the growing cold and darkness. I wanted to jump to the coziness and warmth fullness of Thanksgiving, and then Christmas—oh, the glory and sparkle and light!—was only a hop, skip, and a jump away. Better to simply fast-forward through the unpleasant dour time, I thought, and get to the good stuff.
How typically impatient and blind my childish thinking was. For November is the good stuff. It is the saucer of the year’s teacup, quietly catching the drips and dregs that remind us of what we’ve been given. The indominable life of spring that I so love exploded in summer’s unfolding wealth and, in turn, autumn’s bounty. Now we see the decline, the earth’s inevitable flow toward dormancy. This transition is a grief, yes. How ephemeral is the uncurling of leaves, the beauty of flowers; how windy swift the passing of time. The year fast grows old.
The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind. - Aldo Leopold
But “the brown weedy fields” Alvin Tresselt wrote of in his beautiful children’s book Autumn Harvest are themselves a legacy. Now, I cherish the dark sepia bark of the cottonwoods and faded fawns of the dying and dead sagebrush. All the kinds of brown chaff from what was once thriving are lovely in themselves. And the words for what we so often disparage as an ugly color! Beige and bister, tan and dust. Ochre. Ecru. Wood and mahogany. Copper, rust and bronze. Coffee. Ginger. Cinnamon. Chocolate! Even the colors are testaments to both things we savor and which pass as well as things which last.
Jon and I have been enjoying a last-minute getaway to Sheridan, Wyoming, a town in northern Wyoming gently strung in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. It’s been a full and yet pausing time. Enjoying luscious coffee at the Hygge Hearth. Pondering western art and collections at the Brinton Museum and walking the grounds of the Quarter Circle A Ranch. Marveling at the architecture and century-old details at the Trail End Historic Site and appreciating the sunshine at the Kendrick Arboretum. Soaking in the rest and history of the Sheridan Inn.
Sure, this is a sell for tourism to yet another wonderful community gem in our home state (if you can, you really should go). It’s also given me time to embrace this brown November. Being in an unfamiliar place sometimes, like this, clarifies what’s beautiful. Being around old things, whether natural like the snow-capped Cloud Peak or manmade like much of what we saw today, makes me cherish our time—what we’ve experienced, what we have now, and what will come.
“Behold, the days come,” the Lord told Jeremiah, one of many times. The days keep on coming, sometimes bright and trumpeting joy, sometimes soft and still, sometimes shaken and scattered, lonely and bleak. They all are days given to and for us.
I hope you can treasure your November, too.