"Try November's Love"

 With apologies to Melanie...

Winter's Lover by Joan Story Wright

Come now, forget your April-bitten heart,

And try November's love. He's strong enough

To tear your frail, beribboned dreams apart

And make you scorn the tender for the rough

Sureness of his love-making. Come be wise;

Put springtime's wistful fantasies away

And wipe the blatant rainbows from your eyes.

Rainbows will fade, but never the gusty gray

Of winter's bleak caress. Spring buds deceive;

Not so this bitter lover. Take his hand.

He offers frank commands for weak appeals

And he will trade cold truth for make-believe,

And, for rain's phantom fragrance, the demand

Of a little muttering wind to pluck your heels.

When I read this poem the other night in my November 1951 issue of Ladies' Home Journal, it filled a hole in my heart I didn't realize I had. I can't express how much I needed it.  I needed tough vigor and trust, not sweetness, not this November. 

I needed belief in this month that is my favorite, belief that we will make it through the headwinds that winter might bring. 

When we moved here seven years ago, RH planted two Natchez crape myrtles out front. I dearly love them but it is the old crape myrtle above that steals my heart each summer and now in the fall. 

This scene is what I see outside the bathroom window. I love this tree dressed in its summer beauty but it turns my heart to mush in late October and early November. Somehow the poem seemed to go with the pictures and they both give me strength.

Because it's a long way till summer.

I'm going to try November's love.

Welcome November, my favorite month of the year!

 When it comes about November I get the queerest feeling, as if the real year is beginning.

                         Nelia Gardener White

 

 

November Goodbye

The end of the month has come and time to show another soon to be turned page from my kitchen calendar with illustrations by Kevin Dodds.

October is long gone but in a way November seems a continuation of it with the colors that steal my heart every year.

It's strange but I could swear that late October was the time of the most brilliantly colored autumn leaves when I was a teenager, where now they happen in the first two weeks of November instead.

But even when they're gone I still have autumn leaves inside my kitchen, as well as piles of leaves on the ground.

Some things I just want to hold on to and November is one of them, my favorite month of the year.

Everything in November leads up to one day, Thanksgiving Day.

But just like the seasons, Thanksgiving Day eventually changes too. No more for me is the making of multiple pies.

No more three casseroles and a 19 lb. turkey.

No more setting a big table, with a smaller one at the end.

Instead this Thanksgiving Day ended up being one of the ox in the ditch kind of days (Luke 14:5) and instead of even a small turkey, I sliced up some sirloin steak and stir-fried it with peppers, mushrooms and scallions and served it over rice for RH and me after he came home.

There was fresh cranberry sauce and a pecan pie and it was good.

I've had to give up my Gladys Taber ideas of Thanksgiving Days--

Her dream of Thanksgiving was a cross between a Currier and Ives print and a Grandma Moses painting. She saw people skimming up in sleighs, children gamboling in the yard. Fires burning on every hearth, corn popping, apples toasting, turkey crackling outside, moist and tender within.

Gladys Taber in

Mrs. Daffodil 

Times change as the years go by, our family is far flung now. I really do accept the reality of that and that I'm no longer able to produce a big Thanksgiving meal and neither are my small kitchen and fridge. 

Besides, I have Christmas to look forward to where for the first time in years it looks as if every single family member will be here together for an afternoon before Christmas, depending on whether a new great-granddaughter makes her appearance early or late. 

I am looking forward to that so very much!

Still, I think back to when my own mother had to turn over the reins of big family dinners to her daughters. I remember how she still wanted to cook things to contribute to the meal and how we all really wished she wouldn't--both for her own sake and because we all loved to cook. We were, after all, her daughters.

Here she was at 85, if I remember correctly, at my sister Deb's house. It may have been her birthday celebration. She didn't have to lift a finger, just relax and enjoy it all.

She even has her glass of wine by her chair!

She'd earned her right to relax but I wonder, did she miss all the Gladys Taber Thanksgivings that she and my father hosted? 

I bet she did.

November Melancholy

I love November.

It's my very favorite month of the whole year, one notch above December, strange as that seems, October falling third.

Part of the reason I love it so much is that it suits the part of me that is a tiny bit melancholic in November, and lest you think that melancholy is a bad thing, not to me it isn't.

Don't feel sorry for me. It takes this month touched with melancholy to prepare me for everything that December promises, when December is all that I hope it will be.

How could I experience the joys of December without feeling a little bit sober-minded in November? Could my mind bear the beauty of Christmas without first seeing the beauty of autumn fall from the trees and carpet the ground, leaving myriad shades of brown in the landscape? 

Perhaps November is a little like Lent before Easter to me, broken by Thanksgiving Day. 

I must admit I had never thought about telling anyone about this November melancholy of mine. Maybe I'm doing it now because I had so little sleep last night after our phones shrilly insisted we Take Shelter. 

All was well here and today is a glorious sunny chilly November day and I'm walking around my cozy house feeling deliciously melancholic. 

Loss of sleep may not be all that contributes to this touch of sadness today, a sadness I'm comfortable with. I'm also missing this family, our youngest son and his family who visited us this past weekend.

But Christmas is a'coming and so will they be, and our daughter from Florida, God willing, days when RH and I hope to see all four of our children and their families together at one glorious time. 

Maybe we'll even get a family picture to mark the occasion.

But before that I will not wallow but exalt in this season of somberness. I will celebrate each day until then in my own slightly melancholic November way.

Some melancholy in my nature had always attuned me to fall. The yellow of the birches and beeches, the blaze of maples, the somber red and brown of the few oaks, the brilliance of the sassafras along the road--these moved me like poetry. And when the leaves fell, thick and brown, with sometimes a bit of color still touching the grass, when the bonfires were built at the edge of the road and watched so carefully, when the flowerbeds were layered with leaves that became soggy in the autumn rain, when the last leaves were gone and the trees stood wet against a gray sky--then I felt curiously at home, one with nature and all her sadness.

Nelia Gardner White

from The Pink House