Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Driving down to Big R for some chain I saw a small herd of elk does, maybe 10, in the meadow at the bottom of Shadow Mountain Drive. I watched one, then the others, come slowly out of the woods and begin eating the recently cut grass.
Then, coming home, there in our yard was this fellow and a companion. I pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door and they both kept eating. Just dining out in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood, theirs and ours.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
An establishment in Bailey, further west from here on Hwy. 285.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Kate leaves tomorrow for Driggs, Idaho. Her sister, BJ, and her long time s.o., Schecky, have bought a house outside Driggs. BJ’s living there this summer while she plays violin at the Grand Tetons Classical Music Festival in Jackson Hole, a short drive away in Wyoming. She’s played this festival for several years. Schecky and BJ currently live in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in NYC, not far from Juilliard and Lincoln Center where they met. They’ve lived in the Beacon their entire professional lives. Rent control.
Driggs, then, will be quite a downshift in terms of people and energy. Schecky is originally from the west and they’ve both done extensive backpacking. He plays the cello and has a solo career in Europe and Japan. In the U.S. he plays for the New York City Ballet and the New York Symphony.
BJ turns 60 on the 8th, so this is a birthday trip, but a quick one, since I’m leaving Wednesday for Indiana. With the dogs it’s difficult for Kate and me to travel together on these shorter journeys. Since we bought the Rav4, we’ve only had one car, so we rent from Enterprise and leave the Rav4 for whoever’s at home.
Kate’s taking her featherweight sewing machine and will help BJ with window treatments. She made her chili and cornbread for me yesterday, as well as a peach pie from Colorado Palisade peaches which are now in season.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Next week, on Tuesday, I’m leaving Shadow Mountain for the familiar plains and fields of the Midwest. My 50th high school reunion. Not so long ago it seemed unlikely that anyone could be old enough for a 50th high school reunion. Now. Well.
A friend on whom I had a long schoolboy crush, Tony Fox, has been posting a countdown on Facebook. She came up with some photographs from the Spectrum, our yearbook. These are from our freshman year, 1961. That’s me on the left.
This photograph caused a shock of recognition when I saw it the other day. 54 years later I still find myself in this pose from time to time. The look. Also very familiar. Still.
And yet there is the question of my relationship with this 1961 version. My cells have changed over completely at least 7 times. The narrative that I have or that I am includes this young man, yes, but how? Am I his literal descendant as we tend to think, or am I only a thought, a continuously updating Self that is really brand new from moment to moment?
This photograph raises in me a lot of compassion for this young guy, knowing as I do now what the future, especially through his teens and twenties, holds for him. He will be tested in ways the innocence captured here cannot comprehend.
High school. A complicated time. As were the teen years themselves. Soon to come roaring back for a couple of days in mid-September.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Yesterday, driving on 285 west through the Platte Canyon toward Kenosha Pass, I could feel summer beginning to transition toward fall. The sky was a bit gray, the air brisk, a definite browning in the grasses and small shrubs along the North Fork of the South Platte. The sweet melancholy of autumn passed through me with a quiet shudder. This will be our first fall in Colorado.
These moments of awareness as seasons change carry with them the autumns of yesterday. The smell of leaves burning on the streets in my childhood Alexandria. The homecoming parade. The brilliant blaze that catches fire in Minnesota as oaks, maples, elms, ash, ironwood turn from their productive summer chlorophyll green to the color of the leaf itself. People heading north after Labor Day to close up their cabins. Kicking piles of leaves raked up in the yard. Jumping into them.
What will fall be like in the mountains? I know it will have splashes of gold as the aspens change. There will be brown, the desiccation of grasses and shrubs. But the view from my loft window to the west, which contains lodgepole pines on our property and the massif of Black Mountain in the distance, also covered with lodgepole, will still be green. I imagine the green might become duller, but I don’t know for sure. The angle of the sun will change, has changed already, but the basic green and blue, the sky above Black Mountain, will remain.
The temperatures, especially the nights, will cool down. The mule deer and elk rut are important to fall here, as is the hunger of black bears feeding themselves toward hibernation. A young mule deer buck was in Eduardo and Holly’s yard yesterday, velvet still on his antlers. We’ve seen no does for some time and wonder where they are. Perhaps waiting out the violence of the rut in secluded mountain meadows? They are, after all, its object.
Summer is always a paradox in the temperate zone. It brings warmth and growth, a loose freedom to wander outside with no coat. In that way it opens up the space around us, gives us more room. But the heat can become oppressive, driving people back indoors toward air conditioning. Humidity goes up; weather hazards like tornadoes, torrential rains, thunderstorms, derechoes increase. Here in the mountains, most years, the threat of wildfire spikes. As for me, I am usually happy to see summer slip away.