Savour the season

“Autumn, true autumn, is subsumed into the urgent shopping melee of too-soon Christmas carols.”

Maybe it’s because of the leaves. Or the lack of leaves. Every year, at some point in November, I notice the dogs have changed.

Not the dogs themselves, but their sound. In the city, the metronome of “let me back in, let me back in, let me back in” from the neighbour’s yard is somehow more intrusive: instead of being part of the background noise, it’s right next to you as you work.

In the country, at least in the rural parts I know best, it’s the rabbit dogs: while you can hear a few in summer, fall brings out the whole canine map. You can hear them howling from several points of the compass, sometimes the full hunting cry, sometimes merely the backand-forth conversation of the penned and the bored.

But the change in the sound – the change in many of the sounds – is to me the marker of a distinct season, a season that we don’t appreciate as much as we might.

Sure, there are the fall jobs: dealing with the leaves – whether you mow them to mulch or bag them – taming the garden for snowfall so that everything isn’t buried and crushed, stacking and covering the firewood.

But this is the shortest season, and one of the best. What makes it the shortest, when, in the Atlantic provinces, the space between beach and first heavy snowfall is so long? Well, I think because we’re in such a rush to push past it.

I wish that the shift from Halloween to Christmas wasn’t so quick, that there was a little space between the real hard beginning of fall and the frantic rush of the upcoming holidays, because I think that rush means we lose an important piece of the year.

Autumn, true autumn, is subsumed into the urgent shopping melee of too-soon Christmas carols. Already, as I walk home from work in some of the darkest days of the year, there are houses with fully decorated Christmas trees, even as I’m barely getting used to the cold wind on my face.

I may be a curmudgeon, but I think that, even as late as the last week of November, if I walk past your parked car and it’s throbbing with the obvious notes of “Good King Wenceslas,” you might have a holiday issue.

And I know there are people who love Christmas, who plan for Christmas long before anyone else has even mulled about Christmas wine, let alone actually mulled it.

To get back to the dogs, I know there are some people who sniff out the first scent of Christmas, hunt it down where it’s hiding and roll around in it completely, as dogs are wont to do with, well, other things.

And that’s fine. I don’t really begrudge anyone the things that they enjoy, and that, in their own way, give them a particular purpose.

I just wish that in the process, we didn’t rush to wish any days away.

We think of spring as a parade of firsts – crocuses to tulips, the first appearance of the leaves, the first day outside in shirt sleeves.

But I think we give short shrift to the of autumn: last leaves, first frost, first wood smoke, first dusting of snow, the first time in the year when you come across the puddle on a dirt road, frozen with thin clear spider webs of ice that have met and knit into a sheet.

A sheet of ice where the water has drained away beneath, leaving a suspension of clear freeze, where, if you have a two-yearold with you (or if you can even cast your own memory back to rubber boots and preschool) a crunching footstep is both supreme power and a thin nagging whisper of guilt.

Don’t hurry: time is a ration. Each of us only gets so much.