At the edge of the season

There is no word for the transition from summer to late summer, from late summer to early fall, but the subtle signs of the cold to come already are upon us. Outside my study window, the orb-weaver once again has spun her wagon-wheel web. It seems to grow bigger every day. Already a tiny midge or gnat is caught in it – hanging on as sure as a dinner reservation.

In the meadow, the goldfinches have arrived. They wait until the bee balm goes to seed before they swoop in, their feathers like falling yellow petals – a dozen circling would make a bloom.

Blackbirds descend on the driveway and back lawn, strutting around, pecking at the ground. Some leave their beaks open as though not taking any chances of missing a morsel. Two bump into each other, creating a comical dust-up. They have the iridescent purple feathers of grackles, but the bill and tail are wrong. They are definitely not starlings. They are common crows, but there seems nothing common about them. I could watch their antics all day. Soon, however, they have taken off en masse for greener pastures. Not all crows migrate, but I wonder if these are bulking up to journey a little farther south. Thoreau saw them winging that way as late as Nov. 1.

At Weekapaug, the red seaweed at the water’s edge is another sign of this shoulder season. It tends to proliferate near the end of the year (and is not be confused with red tide, a toxic algae more common in in bays). Nature’s impulse this time of year leans toward profusion: make more, and more, she seems to be saying, as a hedge against lean times to come.

We humans also are caught in these in-between times. For those of us who teach, August brings the dreaded syllabus, the making of which is a task both hopeful and tedious. We scratch away at it, hoping this year’s version will be an improvement over last year’s. August has a last-chance quality about it – last beach day, last ice-cream cone, last outdoor festival. With remarkable regularity my journal marks these days: dread over the coming end to summer’s freedom, determination that this year I will make time for my writing once school starts. “We are in that littoral zone between summer and fall,” I wrote last year in late August. “The tattered flowers know it. The katydids and crickets know it. The first loosened leaves floating off the black walnut trees know it.”

Yet, there is something comforting about this seasonal shift. It brings to mind all the other times autumn arrived before its astronomical turning. Across the street from this house, a dying maple tree turned bright orange in August each year, as sure a sign of the coming fall as back-to-school ads and the bus schedule in the newspaper. In high school I leafed through Glamour magazine’s College Issue and planned my school wardrobe. This, in the magazine’s exaggerated prose, would be my best fall ever! Somehow, those predictions rang hollow by October, when all that had changed was the stack of school books on my desk.

At home, we buttoned up the house for winter. My father filled the woodbox each night, dumping oak into it with a clatter. My mother ripped up her dahlias and put their tubers to bed in shoeboxes. Then as now, the birds took flight, the maple leaves shriveled and dropped, the crickets and katydids were at last silenced.

That early maple was felled years ago. In this old house we no longer have a wood stove to cheer the coming cold. But I saw some dahlias at the park on Tuesday, and I thought of my mother, gone more than a decade now. The memories of this transitory season return as surely as the orb-weaver spinning her web.

Celebrating Trail Wood Day

A year ago this week, I was living and writing at Trail Wood, the home of the late naturalist Edwin Way Teale and his wife, Nellie Donovan Teale. The Connecticut Audubon Society owns the property now, and I was honored to be one of last year’s six artists-in-residence, each of whom was granted a week to create at the Hampton, Conn., property. In memory of that time I have been walking, alone and with Tim, along some of South County’s lovely trails – around Browning Mill Pond in Arcadia, to Ninigret Pond in Charlestown and to Trustom Pond in South Kingstown.

Teale had a penchant for anniversaries. Each year he celebrated his own personal Independence Day, Oct. 15, 1941, the day he quit Popular Science magazine and struck out on his own to write books and freelance articles. The job and the commute to New York City from his Long Island home oppressed him deeply, although it did connect him with important people in the scientific community. Ever after he would mark the day in his journal, such as in 1964, when he called the 23^rd anniversary his “escape from Popular Science.” Readers indeed are lucky that Teale was able to leave the 9-to-5 treadmill and devote his life to observing and writing about nature.

On the Fourth of July, he rang the bell clapper at their door to celebrate the country’s independence and their move to Trail Wood, which occurred on June 11, 1959, as auspicious an occasion as Teale’s own birthday on June 2. The property – now a total of 168 acres – was their Eden, with its trails crisscrossing marshes and woods and upland, its swamps and beaver pond, and the 11-foot-deep pond they had dug several years after moving in. Eventually he had a summerhouse built for Nellie where she could observe birds on the pond unmolested by mosquitoes, and a writing cabin for himself that was fashioned to the specifications of Thoreau’s small house on Walden Pond. Before that, Teale often would take his work outside to what he called his brush-pile study, a small copse covered in twigs from which he could watch wildlife without being detected.

So it seems right to find a way to mark the anniversary of the week I spent there, which lives in me still. A year ago today was Tuesday, my third day at Trail Wood. I woke late (it was hot) but by 9:30 I was in the writing cabin, working on a chapter about my grandmother’s house until early afternoon. My companion that morning was a woodchuck who could have waddled straight out of one of Teale’s books, or Thoreau’s journals. In mid-afternoon I sat on a bench at Turtle Rock (Teale also loved to name things), where I could hear the plucked banjo of a bullfrog, feel the breeze ruffling the lily pads and see, what else, a turtle climb up onto the aforementioned rock.

Later in the afternoon, a storm blew in, but it brought only a brief thunder shower before winging its way east. As I walked to Beaver Pond around 5:30, the trails were wet and the ferns and grass flattened from the rain. Thunder came again shortly before 7, and the power cut off twice but came back on again.

Every day brought work – some afternoons I wrote in the Teales’ bedroom, now an office with air-conditioning – and the joys of wildlife sightings. In the cabin, I was visited by a catbird, a mouse, and a bee. In the sky, I saw hawks and crows, swifts and swallows, goldfinches, blue jays, cardinals, and a hummingbird. A to-do outside the cabin one morning alerted me to a great blue heron diving into the pond for a fish, which it failed to catch. I heard, but did not see, what was probably a muskrat diving into the pond. Like Thoreau mesmerizing the woodchuck, I was able to inch up to a chipmunk, who had gathered a tiny pile of blackberries on one of the paths leading away from the writing cabin. Butterflies were everywhere – black swallowtail, monarchs, yellow swallowtail. Always I felt that Edwin and Nellie would have heard and noticed more than I was able to.

One night, at about 8 p.m., I decided to take a walk – the time of day Teale called the “angelic hour,” of “perfect stillness in the fading moment.” I saw the white half-moon, a dragonfly hovering like a helicopter, and swallows black against the dusky sky.

On my last day at Trail Wood, huge cumulonimbus clouds gathered low on the horizon in the late afternoon. I walked about the yard, photographing them, taking video and sketching them in my journal. I had never seen such clouds – great dramatic puffs with underbellies of gray, the sun lighting some to a glaring swan white, and in the background, faint streaks of cirrus. Beams of light seemed to streak down from the very heavens. Soon it was pouring, although the sun never stopped shining. This was Trail Wood – darkness and light, all the glory of creation, where even the storms seem to portend joy.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of that week is remembering what it was like to live each day in an extraordinary state of awareness. On this anniversary week, I’m trying to get back to that state of mind.

Edwin Way Teale had this writing cabin built overlooking his manmade pond and built to the same specifications as Henry David Thoreau’s small house at Walden Pond.