Orion is up now and I haven't written in the blog in a month.


The autumn colors are pretty much long gone.  The beeches and oaks may hold on to their fading leaves well into the spring, but the show is over.  Nights have been mild and the clover and black-eyed susans are still putting out blossoms, but most of the undergrowth has gone into retrenchment.


Monica loves the outrageousness of the gold and red Vermont leaf-show, but I like the long, drawn-out autumns of the oak-hickory woods.  From when the swamp maples turn scarlet in September until the russet leaves of the red-oaks fall after Halloween, there are always a few species putting on a show.  Each takes it's moment to stand out from the ongoing panoply.

The Nature Center's spooky nature trail was Saturday.  


Monica was veiled and carrying a lantern, silently and spookily relighting the jack o' lanterns that lined the paths.  Nico was a wood sprite on the loose and Porter lurked in the dark, as invisible as a gray forest rock in my old cloak.


When people approached, he rose from the obscurity and stepped forward -- intoning a grave warning that he had composed:


Stop -
The path ahead is scary
for up ahead you will meet a shiny head,
so traveler be wary.


Traveler I do not wish to harm,
but only to warn
that up ahead there will be no choice to turn back.


So I'm giving you the choice now.
Turn back or go on through the web . . . . 

It's Monica's birthday and the boys and I took her out for dinner at Passion Coffee House in New London.  

It was a traditional Colombian feast that we will be eating for days to come. 

Mmmmmmmmmmm . . . . 

The Antioquenos have a proud tradition, recalentado, and the translation of "leftovers" just doesn't do justice to the art form. 

Mmmmm again.

The Orionids

The earth is passing through the ribbons of detritus that Haley’s comet leaves strewn along its orbit – so the Orionid meteor shower was on.  At 10:30 Orion is somewhere behind the oaks, but a meteor streaked up between the Milky Way and the Pleiades, just above the trees, so I chose there to look.  I sat in the yard with the black cat companionably beside me and as I gazed at the sky we listened to the leaves upon the ground.  They rustle as each one curls up in passage from autumn gold to brown leaf litter. 

Though I could see my breath even against the starlight, tree frogs were still croaking from their barky redoubts.  Thin, checkerboard clouds rose insistently from the southwest.  An owl hooted excitedly to the east.  A pack of coyotes yowed and yipped in the distance.  The black cat paid them a momentary attention.  Before the clouds swallowed up the Pleiades completely I was rewarded with a great arcing meteor, just trimming the tops of the trees across the northeast.  It left an afterimage upon my eyes and I went in to bed.

Porter strolled past with the clunky watch he always wears and Monica and I started talking about how cool watches were when you were 11 years old.  I tried to remember when I'd stopped wearing (or even carrying) watches.  And that made me think of one of the handful of crimes I've committed.

It was in a small college course at Penn -- a language and philosophy class I think.  And in the middle of the seminar a piercing, beeping alarm went off.  A girl to the side of me fumbled with her watch, turning bright red as the beeping continued.  The Professor pointedly paused his incomprehensible lecture about Wittgenstein and stared at her as the increasingly desperate girl struggled to shut it off.  At some point I realized that she wasn't going to succeed, because the beeping was actually my own watch alarm coming from the bag by my feet.  But the sound was hard to localize and I knew that it was about to cease on its own, so I opted ignominiously to stare with the rest of the class at the girl for another few painful moments.

The first crime that I remember was stealing from Melvin Alleman in Kindergarten.  The teacher had unrolled long rolls of brown paper onto the floor for us to paint on.  It was near Halloween and we created a parade of monsters and fantastical creatures.  The boys painted one and the girls another.  A day or two later they had dried, and the two "murals" were given out as prizes for something or other.  I won one and Melvin won the other.  The problem was that I had won the girls mural.  Melvin sat in front of me with the boys' mural rolled up in the basket under his seat.   It was a less enlightened era and I had no interest in the girls or their mural.  I fell to temptation and somehow surreptitiously switched the two.

For years afterwards, until my parents finally threw it away,  that roll of brown paper up in the attic with its smudgy, peeling and cracking monsters would remind me of my crime against dim, kind-hearted Melvin.

In case you thought this morning's frost was made up of nothing more than tiny, jagged crystals . . . .

h/t Balloon Juice

We took the long weekend in Vermont to catch the golden end to the autumn leaves.

It's a quiet evening at home. Last night's wind has given way to a clear, cool night.

Monica is reading aloud to Nico a manga version of Romeo and Juliet.

Porter has finished his homework and is engrossed in a novel of dragons and boy-kings. The snake is coiled in his den, the guinea pig is munching in his little cot. The cats roam the dark.

After Saturday's downpours, Sunday was clear and warm and full of priceless, late-season sunshine. We spent the afternoon at the winery's harvest festival with Jiri and Sarka and their boys. We all plucked sweet red grapes from a vine. Like the seasons last hummingbirds, the four boys ran and drank Mexican sodas and sucked on honeystraws, and ran some more. Porter merrily stomped grapes in an open half cask. Nico and Jacob danced in front of the band. Showmen both, they soaked up cheers from the crowd, while Porter shook his head.

Monica finished work at 4 and joined us for a drink of wine, a tostada, and then we were dancing into the dusk.

Charles and Patty eventually brought Nico and Anya back from their friend Indy's birthday party. (Nico reckoned sadly, that now he's the only remaining 7-year old in 3rd grade.) The kids, including Estelle and Porter were full of plans and energy, but all parents were tired from a long week of turgid family logistics. So we shooed off Patty toward home to have a bath and plied Charles with beer. (the Sam Adam's Imperial Stout I bought is too strong, but combined with a Wolaver's ale it makes for a fine black and tan.) And Monica brought out mushrooms salvaged from the Nature Center's festival to make an impromptu pasta dinner.

Went out last night for some music at URI -- Odaiko New England, a band of taiko drummers.

I think the bones of my skull may still be resonating.

After 10 weeks with us, Alberto departed for California -- his two bags packed, his pension full in his pocket. A few last cool, pretty days to give him a dash of autumn -- but nights were dipping to the 30's to give him extra impetus. Now no one will spoil the cats with tinned food and the kitchen will no longer magically clean itself. And the stories have stopped.

For occupation and exercise, he neatly stacked for us two cords of wood, but now we have a third.

Over at Balloon Juice they are composing a left-blogospheric dictionary. Last night they were discussing the current meanings for "liberal" and "conservative." But I stopped reading at the 6th comment because I think El Cruzado nailed it perfectly:

Conservative: anything that self-proclaimed conservatives like or are in favor of.

Liberal: anything that self-proclaimed conservatives dislike or are against.

Anyone looking for a more coherent or consistent stance is missing the point.

Sunday morning brought a breezy, leafy rain. Betty's sermon was about the church as a container for growing one's heart. She donned a beflowered gardener's hat, mud-stained gloves and brandished a flower pot when the children gathered around her.

And later after the children were gone she expounded on one of her favorite names for us, faith community. I'm not sure that I followed everything she said about faith and how it is lived. I agree that one of the welcome things about church is that it is a faith community, but I get a sense that I was working from a narrower (I might even say crisper) definition of what faith means. To me (as a scientist and son of a science teacher) faith is irrevocably about the unreasoning leap one takes when one reaches the outer limit of reason/science/empiricism -- call it what you will. Unitarian-Universalists generally value that reasoned, material-experience-based working out of life's questions and answers. And that may make them interesting philosophers, humanists, neighbors, activists and so on.

But what makes them a UU is often-enough an act of faith; is as Betty put it, laying the heart down on a set of principles. These principles don't have to be (and I think can't be and probably shouldn't be) reasoned out, or argued for, or proved in some objective sense. The act of faith is taking that leap and saying that, "I don't need proof that every human being deserves my love and respect -- I'm just going to lay my heart down on that precept and simply declare it so."

(Of course, what I see as a leap of faith, other people experience as knowing what is ineffably true, and that creates some tension when the term faith seems a disparagement . . . .)

There's nothing inherently constructive or activating about leaps of faith. Most people's acts of faith are pretty misguided and counter-productive as far as I'm concerned. But when you have legitimately taken reason and argument as far as you can take them -- and you've looked into the word-less and reason-less regions of self and other and found a place beyond that, where it seems right to lay down your heart -- then faith is the act we have.

And a faith community is nothing more than the band of people that happens when a group of people make the same leap.

Maybe that's what Betty said and I just needed to put things in my own words, or maybe she was adding something to that. In any case I can thank church and leafy rain for once again for keeping the spiritual and philosophical juices flowing . . .

Monica, Alberto and Porter climbed into the car and headed for Vermont to see the maples turning orange and red.

Nico and I headed to Connecticut, to the corn maze in Preston where his class was gathering for the fall social. B. had a few things organized for the kids, like visiting the calves, a hay ride and pizza.

When it comes to supervision, parents at the school keep their kids on leashes of varying lengths, but I gladly let Nico off to do as he liked -- which was to race immediately off into the maze. This was annoying to some of the parents who were trying to keep their kids from disappearing until after the pizza, etc. But I was coming off three days fighting a bad cold and just wanted to sit in the glorious September sunshine. Besides, cornfields remind me too vividly of the wilderness of childhood, and I had no interest in interfering in Nico's day.

Eventually all of the kids would disappear in the maze -- some with adults attached, some without. But one of the themes of the idle, pleasant, desultory parental conversation was about how much free reign to give kids. Some feared that a child who merrily wandered the maze, might panic as soon as they decided they wanted out. Others feared that they might meet harassing teens in the maze. Others, like me shrugged it off and saw our prejudices confirmed each time happy, sweating kids emerged from the maze to grab a drink or to show how many stamps they'd found. We'd get reports on who they'd run with or run into in the maze.

Alejandra was one who worried, though she had let her son, Matteo, go off with a group of the others, accompanied by an adult. When she heard from others that he wasn't with that group any longer, she contained her worry. Time went by and no one reported seeing him. Finally, the afternoon was stretching when Nico came out and sat with me. Alejandra asked him if he'd seen Matteo and Nico said, "He was with us, but then he separated from us." "How did that happen?" asked Alejandra. "He went off with some guy." "Who?" Nico didn't know -- hadn't seen him before. It was some man who said he'd show him where to get one of the stamps.

Adult faces went suddenly stony, and the worst fears of parenthood didn't need to be voiced. Alejandra and B. were out of their seats heading for the maze. I was talking seriously to Nico to make sure he wasn't making anything up - that Matteo had gone off with a strange adult.

In the end, it turned out that it was the farmer who had taken Matteo and Nick around the maze showing them each and every stamp station. (Nico had not recognized him because he hadn't gone on the hayride.) But there was an unpleasant 10 or 15 minutes as a half-dozen parents went around calling for Matteo. (I suspect, as I kind of hope Alejandra doesn't, that Matteo ignored the calls for at least a while because he was on the trail of the last of the stamps.)

Nico hadn't seemed troubled during the search, and had happily helped call out his name from a bridge with Annabelle and Anya. But before we left he hugged Matteo from behind and began to cry. I asked him why he was crying and he said because he'd been afraid for Matteo being lost. Matteo looked wide-eyed at his mother who knelt to comfort Nico and told him, "that's exactly how I was when I couldn't find him. I felt terrible and I cried, too." Matteo asked her seriously, "You really cried? Like tears?", turning where Nico still gripped his shirt. "I stood on the bridge there and I cried," she told him. I don't think she had, actually -- I think she'd gone steely. But I know she was grateful now to Nico, who had made Matteo so suddenly aware.

Culebra, the newest member of the household . . . .