Into each life some rain must fall

One has to be an Oregonian in order to appreciate the cartoon that rain, er, ran, in our paper:

Source

We had some showers after a long dry spell, with weather stats reminding us that rainfall has been barely a fifth of the normal.

I like the rains.  I often remark, "no rain, no green."  And without the green and the river, well, this will be southern California!

As I kept thinking about the rain, I remembered that way back in high school we studied a poem called "The Comforters."  As my daughter remarked more than once with annoyance, the nerd in me remembers such stuff that we studied decades ago.  Hey, that's the only skill I have--I don't know how to grow crops or change a car tire or even pound a nail!

Hopefully, too much rain is not falling in your life.  If there is something, may this poem ease your mind, in case you live in a place where there is no rain and wind to comfort you, and may you also find comfort in Ella Fitzgerald's song.


The Comforters
By Dora Sigerson Shorter

When I crept over the hill, broken with tears.

When I crouched down on the grass, dumb in despair,
I heard the soft croon of the wind bend to my ears,
I felt the light kiss of the wind touching my hair.

When I stood lone on the height my sorrow did speak,
As I went down the hill, I cried and I cried,
The soft little hands of the rain stroking my cheek,
The kind little feet of the rain ran by my side.

When I went to thy grave, broken with tears,
When I crouched down in the grass, dumb in despair,
I heard the sweet croon of the wind soft in my ears,
I felt the kind lips of the wind touching my hair.

When I stood lone by thy cross, sorrow did speak.
When I went down the long hill, I cried and I cried.
The soft little hands of the rain stroked my pale cheek,
The kind little feet of the rain ran by my side.   

Have you ever seen the rain?

We are nearly a month into fall.

A month into autumn, if you prefer that word instead.

But, it doesn't really feel like fall here in the valley.

Why?

It has been way too pleasant.  Gorgeous day after gorgeous day.  Plenty of sunshine. Heavenly day time temperatures.  Pleasant evenings.

And no rains!  Not a cloud up above.

By now, we would have had quite a few rainy days.  The overnight lows should have started trending towards the low 30s.

Even as we enjoy this, there is a worry in the back of many of our heads: This does not feel right.

Maybe climate change? Maybe el nino?

Whatever the reasons, when it does not rain during the time it is supposed to rain, one does not have to be farmer to worry.  Even this city-slicker is worried.

Because, to everything, there is a season.

I know that the day is not far away when I will complain about the rain, the always overcast sky, the never to be seen sun, the cold temperature ... but, that behavior, too, is a part of life. 

Awesome is the word!

It is a brand new season according to the sun, which will now begin to slowly fade away from these northern latitudes.

Decades ago,  when I was in elementary school, I knew about the four seasons only because the textbook described it so.  After all, back then, the seasons I knew were summer--when it was extremely hot--rainy season, and then the rest.  Autumn? Winter? We learnt that Himalayas meant the abode of snow; but, I had no idea what snow felt like.  Leaves changed colors only when they were dead.  Such was life in the near-equatorial conditions.

Now, my daily life is in sync with the changing seasons.  The sun's apparent movements between the tropics determine my work and my downtime.  Summer means being furloughed from work,, and it is months of doing nothing, as the posts over the three months have shown ;)  Well, according to my neighbors, I don't work any season!  The fall term at school begins after the autumnal equinox; the winter term begins after the shortest day of the year; and the spring term begins as the sun begins to spend time in the northern hemisphere.  Thus, I am like the farmers in the old days whose lives were determined by the seasons.

It was a sunny, pleasant day, today as I stepped out for the walk by the river.  "Can't complain on a day like this" I told the neighbor who was out doing yard work.  The kind of work that I have no clue about.

"The only hassle is that in the morning it is cold, and you have to wear long-sleeves.  Then as the day progresses you have to start taking layers off because it is warm" he said.

"Yep, that is our biggest hassle now.  Which means we really have nothing to complain about" I said.

I laughed. We all laughed. On days like this, it is difficult to be morose and maudlin.

"I am off for the only physical activity that I engage in" I said as I kept walking.

Walking is an exercise.  It is also time for contemplation.  To think about things.  Sometimes to even forget what I have been thinking about--a blissful nothingness that arises from thinking.

I was in that state of nothingness when I was awakened by a woman on a bicycle who said "what a beautiful day" as she passed me.

"Oh, an awesome day" I responded.

She turned her head towards me, slowed down just a tad, and said, "you are right.  It is awesome!"

Awesome is such an American word.  I smiled at the thought.

I was back to my blissful nothingness.

To everything ... turn, turn, turn

And like that the summer is seemingly gone.

Not gone, gone yet.  But, change is in the air.

In fact, it was even on the ground; it was a shock to find these leaves even before August had ended, and when the official end to summer is more than three weeks away!

A far change from the corner of the old country where I grew up.  There, the  significant deviation from the hot days and months was when the rains came, and when the monsoon downpours that then filled up the gully by our home.  We would watch through the window the volume and the velocity picking up as the water became muddier by the minute.

There were seasons of different kinds in the old country.
Like the mango season.
The wedding season.
The annual school holiday season.

Seasons are how we mark time.

In this corner of the world that is home to me, I joke with students that if it were not for the seasonal changes in the temperature, I would not know how to get ready for classes.  With the academic calendar wonderfully in sync with the changes in the conditions in the natural world, if it were the glorious summer all year round, then we might never ever get to any serious work at all.

But, perhaps life in a tropical paradise where nobody really worked is not a bad thing;  after all, life is not about working, and if one simply enjoyed the existence in a tropical paradise, who is to say that a life thus lived is inferior to one that is governed by work and calendar!  Does it really matter if one simply lived, ate, had sex, and died convinced that it was a wonderful life, without having ever wondered, even for a nanosecond, how all these came about?  Is it condescending and judgmental to claim that a life not examined is not worth it?

You see, this is what happens as the summer begins to yield to cooler temperatures.  Frivolous thoughts are pushed aside and yield to contemplation.  It is no surprise, therefore, that even Hollywood waits until the fall and winter to release the serious movies--when the berries abound and when the roses are in bloom, it is difficult to imagine that life is not an endless Oregon summer.

The seasons change.
We, too, change.

The final full moon of the summer is a treat: a blue moon

It was a beautiful almost full moon earlier this evening, by when the temperate summer day had already cooled down. 

I didn't want to stop looking at the moon, almost as if I feared that if I did, then the gorgeous summer will end here in the paradise called the Willamette Valley.  Not content enough, I drove so that I could view it against a far more expansive sky than the one that the window at home permitted.

The moon kept rising and, with a feeling of joyful emptiness, I returned home.

All good things come to an end. Eventually.

Slowly and steadily, the days will get shorter.  The mornings are much cooler for longer periods of time than even a fortnight ago, and darkness comes earlier and earlier.

I am amazed at how much I, who grew up in near equatorial conditions, have come to appreciate the changing seasons and feel my life synchronized with it.  When the days are long and warm, I rarely feel like working and, instead, want to enjoy the daylight.  Now, the cooler mornings and evenings somehow seem a lot more conducive to getting real work done.  The reading and the writing is a lot more focused, and my mind is rapidly shifting towards the classes that I am looking forward to.

Prompted by the cooler temperatures, I even used the oven yesterday, after more than a couple of months when the air was so warm that I simply could not even imagine the oven being on.

Soon, the days will get shorter and shorter, and Christmas will prompt us to look forward to days getting longer by the minute.  The bright sunlight will become rare here, as the clouds gather to remind us that Oregon is wet and, therefore, green.  We won't long for cold salads, but for hot soups.  We will bake and cook.  Rarely will I see neighbors out and about as the rain and the clouds settle in for the long haul until late next spring.

The next full moon will be the first autumnal moon. The "harvest moon."  Once a friend had invited us to a backyard gathering where the after-dinner activities included poetry reading and howling at the first full moon of the fall season.  I don't remember if I howled. I wish I had.

"It peed on me" ...

Two kids, both about eight to ten years old, and perhaps brother and sister, slowly passed me on their bikes as the boy yelled out shaking his hand, "it peed on me."

His yell startled me from my thoughts in which I was I was quite lost while walking by the river.

It was a glorious sunny midday after a few morning sprinkles and apparently quite a few others had the same idea to take advantage of the break in the rains.

I almost burst out laughing, but checked myself from that act, lest I confirm to passers by that I am indeed a nutcase!  I watched the brother and sister park their bikes, and the brother yelled again, "I swear, it peed on me."

By now, I was utterly curious.  What was that "it?"

I was now about to pass them when I saw what the girl had in her hand--a woolly bear caterpillar.

I assumed that the boy too had picked up one, but when it showed its displeasure/panic at having been abruptly removed from its crawl, well, it peed/excreted on him :)

The crawling caterpillar is yet another evidence that the season has changed.  It is as if we live in a Truman Show kind of settings, and the Ed Harris equivalent decided that the story needed a change and flipped a couple of switches.

The warmth of the fabulous summer is long gone.  When I wake up in the morning, I need to turn on the lights first because of how dark it now is at 5:30 in the morning.  The sky is often overcast, and it has started raining.  After almost ten years here, I know all too well that the rains have merely begun, and rainy days will outnumber sunny ones all the way until Memorial Day.

With the changing seasons, our daily activities begin to change.  We begin to stay indoors more and more.  We begin to bake dishes in the ovens.  All of a sudden, soups and hot tea become so appealing.  The home heaters is already on. 

As it darkens even more, we will begin our complaints about the weather.  About how damp it always is.  How we can't seem to shake off the coldness.  And then we will compare our conditions with the blizzards from Montana to Maine and thank heavens we live here.  But then we will look at Southern Californians having a good time by the Pacific, and we will wonder why our coasts have to be so windy and cold all the time.

Slowly spring will make its appearance.  We will get excited on seeing those crocuses and daffodils and tulips.  The days will once again start getting longer.  We won't be able to wait for the real summer, and will wonder and worry when it will be summer.

When summer arrives, we would have forgotten all the miseries of the cold and the rain and the damp and the darkness.  And we will not be ready for the summer to end. But it will.

And then I will see the woolly bears crawling again.

Life.

It is autumn ...

... says America's Finest News Source :)

Autumn is here. How about a poem?

These are the last days of summer.  Autumnal equinox is only a few days away: Sep 22nd, at 11:09 PM EDT.

And then? As the days become shorter than the nights,

We head indoors.
  Go to classes.
    Wonder at the changing colors on trees.
      Complain about the leaves on the ground.
        Start using the ovens.
          Yell at football players on the TV screen.  ...

To commemorate this, I headed to my favorite source for poems, which is where I came across this beauty:

Autumn Movement
by Carl Sandburg

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,
       the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things
      come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,
      not one lasts.

The season changes: Autumn

The moon was sinking over the hills, the air was crystal clear, the wind was cool, and the songs of the insects among the autumn grasses would by themselves have brought tears.

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (1010). While a lady in attendance at the Japanese court, Murasaki wrote what is widely considered to be the first novel. The work was unusual for its time, not only because it was written by a woman, but also because it was written in Japanese (Chinese was the lingua franca of the Japanese court) and in prose. The beauty of nature is a prominent theme of the story, which recounts the life of Genji, a handsome courtier, and the women he loved.

 More here on The Violins of Autumn
HT