Post-Labor Day

Labor Day has long been considered the end of summer though there is usually two or three weeks before the equinox. School usually began the Tuesday after Labor Day: I had spent a good portion of my life in school. In Fall, apples began to appear on the shelves and I make apple crisps, cobblers and crumbles; winter clothes came out of storage and I was permitted again to wear my beloved corduroys. On the radio reports on fall colors become part of every newscast and people would plan drives into the places to best view the dying leaves. Thoreau suggests that Fall leaves teach us how to die: in blazing colors! Alas, too many of my shirts are blue and gray.

Another experience that I have come now, having lived for thirty-five years in the mid-west, to associate with the advent of Fall is the quite busy appearance of bees and spiders. Each day I discover bees swarming on my apartment deck, and my windowsills are threaded with spider webs every morning. I am not fond of bees: in their own behalf they sting adversaries like me.  On the floor at the bottom runner on my patio door is an overrun mortuary of executed bees who had ventured uninvited into my domain. Neither am I very friendly with spiders: I have had two memorable frightening confrontations with arachnids. In the crispy mornings from the windows where the spiders have woven their willowy traps, I sweep away the webs that are attached to glass and screen. When my daughters were younger, we watched Charlotte’s Web too many times. I recall Charlotte telling Wilbur that in the webs she would catch her meals and wrap them up so to keep them fresh. In the wispy webs on my windowsills there are no packaged repasts, and I wonder if the spiders just continue to spin their webs out there out of a certain rebelliousness. Spinoza says that the free man thinks least of all of his death. Maybe the spiders are spinozists. Alas, I am not so free

. . . or that wise. Nature has its order but to me who has not discerned that order think that every season has its clutter: in the Fall my windows are covered with spider webs, and every day I sweep these webs from my windows though I rarely see the active weaver. in the Spring I wait to wash my windows until the cottonwood trees have stopped their shedding: the feathery floating white tufts of seeds clog my screens and the view out of the windows is obstructed. The cottony tufts float through the air and fall like snow; in late June the sharp green grass is covered as if with winter’s snow. Summer storms blow down trees and flood the streets and rivers. Winter has meant frigid cold and snow drifts through which I cannot walk. Now I avoid winter and escape to a warmer climate.

The Fall leaves fall in the times of their dyings and like the bees in the patio door window-runners or the spider’s lairs in my windowsills they cover the surface. But the trees from which they fall remain and will issue forth green leaves in some months’ time. The bees will die and others will somehow maintain the hive with resources they have produced from their Spring and summer honey stores. Life goes on.

I know the Spring will come again and I do love the colors of Fall, the crispness of the morning air and the donning my corduroy pants. And there is some stark beauty in the bare trees whose branches will be soon blanketed in snow. There is some comfort in the hibernations of winter. But I don’t welcome the stark grayness of late Autumn and Winter. There is death all about: in the air empty of birds that have flown, on the naked tree branches and the white snow covering of the ground. As the snow falls I think of the closing lines of Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.” Thoreau saw life everywhere: Nature was his guide and source of strength. I have my books.

Labor Day has come and gone. I do not labor much these days