Between the end of summer and the shortest day of the year, I battle a constant feeling of disbelief. All things come to a halt rapidly; they die, die, die; the garden is all brown stalks and the ground is tightening. What continues to grow and bloom does so in isolation.

Jamaica Kincaid

EPHEMERIS FOR THE SECOND WEEK OF LATE FALL

    The Buzzard Migration Moon becomes the Sandhill Crane Migration Moon on November 16 at 2:14 p.m. During the next thirty days, you may hear the cranes passing overhead as they move to their winter habitat.
    The Leonids are the shooting stars of November. Watch for them after midnight on the 17th and 18th.
 

LOOKING HARDER

   The final rites of Late Fall include a chronology of the last leaves and fruits. Major losses occur on beeches and pears as autumn ends. Sometimes oaks are the holdouts, sometimes forsythia or a hardy honeysuckle. Sometimes sweet gums and poplars keep a few leaves this late in the year; sometimes protected oak-leaf hydrangeas, Osage, mock orange or lilacs outlast all the other trees and shrubs.

   At the street corner near my house, bittersweet continues to fall to the sidewalk. Yellow witch hazel flowers are shriveling. Privets are bare, their blue berries revealed. Winterberry fruits are losing their white outer shells, orange cores unveiled by the cold.

   New England aster and stonecrop foliage turned yellow in early November; now the plants are shedding. Late garden lettuce and the autumn growth of rhubarb have withered. Hosta leaves have collapsed into the remnants of maples, ginkgoes and white mulberries. The gooseneck turns chocolate brown. Most all the seeds are gone from milkweed pods; just a few wisps of down cling to their shells. Fragile pokeweed stems have exploded in the frost. The last roses have been frozen by nights in the teens.

    As the earth loses all of summer, I try to find as many pieces as I can. In her novel, The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama describes how it is: “Maybe it’s the light that gradually grows darker, she says, making everything seem less trivial, forcing you to look harder to find your way.”