In the Pacific Northwest, it is the cold rain that really starts to express the tough love of Fall’s onset: it is time for you to chill out and get your ass inside. Warm rain on the other hand may not be the most pleasant for working in, but it doesn’t quite diminish the bite of that old guilt emanating from the Protestant Work Ethic, that relentless spiritual echo of an era when Western humanity was relentlessly clawing back a social order that was being crushed in the cold grip of the Little Ice Age.
In the warm rain, your layers get progressively soaked and the dirt turns to mud and you track the stuff everywhere. It can be quite miserable, but it also doesn’t quite extinguish that incessant nag that you should probably be out getting something done. Every available hour where it is physically possible to toil away is best seized and burned up. And lawd help you if those clouds break to reveal a clear day with a shining sun, and the labor-guilt burns through, hot like the emerging sun itself: "Time is money; let's get to it."
The cold rain on the other hand soaks through and your body
temperature starts dipping, and in the ensuing chill you think, well to hell with this, and you go
in to warm up and get dry by the fire. And the first frosts trigger the end of
the growing season for most plants, and the insects vanish and go into their
hibernation, and all of the birds and mammals that depend on all of this follow
suit to downshift their own frenetic activity. Everything begins to disappear, and the earth begins to go quieter. That’s when the thoughts begin to turn inward: the recursive review of the working
season kicks in. The energy goes to the head. The emotions wander those inner
recesses and pick away at past experiences, and the imagination kicks in and
one speculates about what’s next.
There is a finality to a changing transition season, because as everything begins to go dormant at once, there is a broad-based quieting that changes the entire texture of the productive landscape. Productive activity shifts to preserving what harvests are left - and of course some of this starts in the Summer too - because there will be a long stretch of time in which nothing is producing, and so it is a time to stockpile and then begin to prepare for the dead of Winter.
And yet! The coming of the cold and the rain was touched off from a belch of warm air from the south, from where Summer still hollers. I woke in the middle of the night to rigorous warm gusts, which roared with a sustain in which you could hear the waves of wind passing through the trees, but which then continued on roaring and shaking longer than expected, and I rolled onto the floor and against the bed after hearing cracks and crashes as distant trees and limbs fell, and then an even closer crash as the top of a nearby leaning alder-of-concern busted off and hit the ground nearby.
Well, not all growing quiet and contemplation. The gears grind as we prepare for a changing-of-the-guard in the presidential election. And reports continue to pour in of a world bathed in rocket fire in the Middle East. Off we slouch into Winter.
