My latest garden friend is this Umber Skipper who skipped around all of the zinnias as they waved on their long stems in the breeze… until he found the bouquet I was cutting, at which point he kept coming back to drink at a the more stationary offering of nectar. That was when I could focus on him long enough to find out his name and get a picture of his beautiful wings, and even his body hair.
MOON OVER MOUNTAIN PASS
The birds have vanished into the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
-Li Po (701 – 762) China
The poem as translated above I found in Czeslaw Milosz’s collection, Luminous Things, but there is at least one more translation, which goes like this:
MOON OVER MOUNTAIN PASS
All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other –
Only the mountain and I.
-Li Po
Which do you like better?
To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum
on the day of the burial of Yitzak Rabin, November 6th 1995.
Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,
for I know you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know
there is no answer
but loving one another
even our enemies, and this is hard.
But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine
though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.
You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be
the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.
-Wendell Berry
The friend of a friend who gave me quinces last fall has given from her tree again, bless her heart. This time she didn’t drop them off at church, but I drove across the county a ways to pick up two boxes of fruit at her gate. This I was more than happy to do, because it is a gorgeous drive through hills and valleys, small vineyards and large gardens, along winding roads where every kind of tree imaginable has been planted to round out the natural oak forest.
It has rained and drizzled off and on the last two days, so every tuft of grass or turning leaf is extra fallish and delicious, all the scents mixed up with each other in the damp air. After I picked up my quinces and started back home, I wished so much that I could take a long walk in that part of the country; but the roads are quite narrow, I could not find a shoulder to park on, and I wasn’t wearing good shoes for that kind of outing. So I feasted my eyes on the sights as I rolled along, while my nose drank in the quince perfume from the back of the car.
When I got home, my copy of The Complete Brambly Hedge had arrived, after being delayed for months. Maybe I never had bought one of my own, or maybe I gave it away, but earlier this year I looked and looked and could not find one in the house, so I ordered it. As I leafed through its pages this afternoon I recognized the drama of autumn in the wonderful pictures. I think if I had been able to take that walk in the country, and to peer under the bushes, I would likely have glimpsed scenes like this one, from “Autumn Story”:
Similar things are going on in my own garden, and not just among the smallest creatures. I walked around this afternoon trimming this and that, and pulling long pine needles off of everything. Sunday I found the first ripe fig on the fig tree; this is a whole month later than ever before. Mentions on my blog in the past tell of their beginning to ripen as early as the third week of August. Normally they continue ripening into November, so I hope I might get at least a month’s worth of fruit.
I picked all the remaining (18) lemons from the tree, and was glad to see that, contrary to my fears of there not being much fruit to ripen this winter, lots of tiny lemons have showed up (above), and even blossoms. Somehow my tree is turning out to be a sort of everbearing lemon. That’s okay with me!
The arbutus we call the strawberry tree has both unripe fruit and blossoms as well. I remember the grandboys on a ladder picking the fruit one Thanksgiving, so those treats are yet to come as well.
A Mediterranean Katydid visited me upstairs this week. I think I saw one of those here last year, too; do they like to come in the house for some reason? I assumed that this one would 
rather be outside, so after a couple of days of him migrating from one room to another and lastly surprising me on the bathroom faucet one morning, I got him into a jar and released him into the lemon basil clippings. But it was nice to have his company for a while.
Now — the lemons and quinces are calling me to get to work and put away their goodness against the winter. The sun is expected to come out tomorrow and we have some mildly warm days to look forward to; when the figs begin to come on strong I’ll be dehydrating them to put away, too. My own Autumn Story is one in which I am given, and am surrounded by, nourishing scents and fruits of the earth, and plenty of them.
Gladsome Lights 