02.15.07
The November of Renewal
When we arrived, the Sink was a hot, arid place, and it only seemed to become more so as Spring burned into Summer. Autumn, though, was a temperate season right from the equinox. It did not offer the freshness and youth of Spring, but it offered something equally consoling: the peace of gradual decline; that comfort of the old which the young cannot conceive.
Autumn, though, did not endure more than five or six weeks. It happened that the close of October, marked in a child’s mind by the annual festival of Halloween, represented a transformation in the Sink, as it does in a similar manner throughout California.
Halloween is said to have once been a Celtic New Year’s Eve festival. I don’t know why the Celts chose the close of October to be the close of the year, but it comes naturally enough to Californians, for it is usually soon after Halloween that the winter rains arrive.
We say winter rains, but what one feels if one walks in the midst of the meadows is the conception of a new cycle of life. The reclined rays of sunlight and cooler weather are no threat to life. There is light and warmth enough, but what is in dire need, and what has been utterly nonexistent for six months, is water. November, then, may not be the favorite month of the Sun worshipper, but the meadows love November. This is when the embryo is planted in the womb of California. By bleak January, the hills will have transformed from the dull, grayish brown of death to the bright greens of rebirth.
The October air is polluted with the exhaust of the year. We blame the cars, the farmers, and the great cities for the suffocating soup that masquerades as air, and we are justified in part, but it is also true that the Sink has always collected the exhaust of the year. Man did not invent fire; certainly not in this land of fire.
But come November the exhaust of the old year is washed away, and puddles of it lay scattered about the Sink bottoms. I looked out that first morning of the year, and walked out and smelled the strange mix of dust and chemical and humidity; it was foreign. It was refreshing to breathe again.
© 2007 Dan J. Jensen
