Ode to a Dark Season

November can feel like a mournful time, but there are pleasures in its gray solitude.
By Margaret Renkl

This is the month of blank, lowering skies, when the last of the leaves lift and drift away into a drizzly wind. The hardwood trees would normally be bare by mid-November, even in the South, but seasonal cues can be hard to read in this changing climate. It was 98 degrees in Nashville on October 1, and before that the usual September rains never came. I feared there would be no color at all this fall, but I was wrong. The sugar maples have gone golden at last, though not in the bright glory of October. This year they are glowing against gray November skies, each leaf giving off its own light, a tiny sun come to earth.

The forest understory has died back now, and the contours of the land are evident once more. In November I love to look at the places where rainwater flows downhill to find Otter Creek, and then the Little Harpeth River, and someday — winding through the great Mississippi River watershed — the Gulf of Mexico. In summer, the forest keeps the journey of rainwater a secret, tucks it away under a tangle of green, just as it keeps hidden all the songbird nests that are so visible now against a pewter sky... (continues)