November

Nov 30 2019

It is November,

and we are marooned

in that orphaned month

of crusted snow and brooding cloud,

when darkness rules

and the dead are buried in frozen ground.

Lost between

autumn's crimson glory

and December's tinselled trees,

the festive season

when we mercifully forget

November's barren bleakness.

Like fly-over country,

the month is a flat featureless expanse

between the glittering cities of the coastal strips

where ambitions are big

and people live large.

Where every day

must surely be Christmas.

All month, it has hovered near freezing,

a wet cold

that penetrates bone.

The snow is as soiled and sparse as a mangy hound,

low sun

exposing the bare brown of dormant grass.

The thin-blooded birds have fled

leaving mostly chickadees and crows,

whose sarcastic cawing

torments the dogs

who futilely bark

at the wily black corvids.

The month when mice invade the house

through impossibly small openings,

a Malthusian army of rodents

seeking shelter and food.

Darkness falls too soon

and the days keep shortening,

while baseball's long gone

but not the withdrawal.

And once again, we're on storm-watch

with freezing rain possible.

Maudlin Christmas movies

appear sooner and sooner,

as we graze, with guilty pleasure

on empty comfort food.

It's as if time has almost stopped,

the calendar unfolding

with glacial slowness,

a retreating mountain of ice

grinding us down

like stranded rock.

And now, as Thanksgiving approaches

all I can be grateful for

is the end of the month,

counting down the days

as the gloom ratchets up.

My apologies for invoking American Thanksgiving. But media make it so omnipresent in our lives, even north of the border, it's hard to talk about November without including that holiday: the one point of interest, anticipation, ritualistic pleasure that stands out this month. (Or, conversely, that nightmare of travel, conflicted family reunion, and the official beginning of the orgy of consumption and shameless waste that will mercifully end only when Christmas ends.)

November, along with March, represent those in-between “shoulder” seasons that feel more like place-holders or biding our time than destinations. A friend recently commented on this – her least favourite month – and as it comes to an ignominious conclusion, I can't help but agree.

I never watch Christmas movies, by the way. Too sentimental. Or graze mindlessly, for that matter. And my dogs don't really interact with crows. In fact, I've noticed that dogs almost never look up. Unless they're looking at me, it's either straight ahead or down their noses at the ground. They never take in a starry sky, a full moon, the flights of geese. And I do not envy the coastal metropolitans. I prefer a quiet private life, and happily live without status or striving. I do miss baseball, though. And the mice are indeed here. I hate trapping them. But, as the poem says, where there is one mice there are many, and if allowed to reproduce unchecked they would quickly overwhelm the place.