Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on November)

“In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.”—American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), "November Afternoon," The Heart of Another (1941)

I took the image that accompanies this post a couple of days ago in Pondside Park in Harrington Park, a few towns away from me in Bergen County, NJ. I was coming back from a trip into Rockland County, NY when I saw this park on the side of the road, and pulled over for a walk.

I have increasingly felt that autumn is all too short a season in my part of the country, with warmer temperatures encroaching on the traditional point marking fall. The past several days, however, the temperatures have dropped and the winds have whipped up. I had to pull my scarf around me a little more tightly the other day as I circled this pond.

Leaf-changing—heck, leaf disappearance—can occur so rapidly these days. The magnificent profusion of colors seen on trees just a couple of weeks ago is all gone. The many leaves crunching beneath my feet were all brown, as were those that remained on trees for now.

So, to take up the question posed by Gellhorn so long ago, how long will winter be? I might have worried more about global warming if we continued to have balmy temperatures at this point. For now—fingers crossed—Earth is back into its usual rhythms, I hope.

Quote of the Day (William Dean Howells, on November)

“How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children's childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.”—American man of letters William Dean Howells (1837-1920), “November,” originally printed in Stops of Various Quills (1895), republished in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)

I took the image accompanying this post, of the Smithsonian Butterfield Habitat Garden, outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, when I was on vacation in Washington, DC, nine years ago this month.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on ‘Bare November Days’)

“Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “My November Guest,” in A Boy's Will (1915)
 
I took this photo in Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, three years ago this month.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on London’s ‘Implacable November’ Fog)

“Implacable November weather….Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun….

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”— Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Quote of the Day (Phyllis McGinley, on November, ‘Spinster of the Year’)

“Away with vanity of man.

  Now comes to visit here

The Maiden Aunt, the Puritan,

  The Spinster of the year.”—Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978), “November,” in The Four Seasons: Poems, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Everyman’s Library, 2008)