At the Stove.

At the Stove

Today is a Jane Austen day: it’s November, it’s raining, it’s chilly, it’s gloomy, and the wet air swirls with russet leaves falling to the ground. Summer and its cotton skirts, open windows, overflowing windowboxes, bathing suits, porch dinners, and night music is a memory and like a lot of memories, tinged with longing, edged with wistfulness.

It is good to live in a place where summer can be recalled on a dreary Jane Austen afternoon, good for the imagination, good for the workings of the soul. Many chapters ago, I lived for a few years in San Francisco, and while the fog was captivating and the food notable, there wasn’t nearly enough distinction between the seasons to satisfy my inner cravings.

In these so-short days when the four o’clocks descend with dusk and darkness, it’s interesting to note that with the leaves gone, more pale light filters through the trees and the spellbinding sunsets are arias in charcoal and silver, as if Nature is offering some compensation for the loss of those broad, sunny hours, that warmth soaking into our shoulders.

Like all of the animals and each of the falling leaves, we know that winter is soon upon us, and increasingly, a New England winter is something to be reckoned with. Snow falls, cold builds, ice jams, trees topple, roads slicken, lights go out, furnaces fail, blizzards happen.

We miss warmth, we need warmth, and so we turn to our stoves and dig out recipes for stew and soup and roasts and casseroles, to our trunks and attics for sweaters and boots and scarves and mittens, to our bookshelves and each other for insights and companionship when the wind roars around the corners of the house and all the world is silent save for that.

It’s a Jane Austen afternoon. I’m going to make soup tonight out of tomatoes and beans and garlic and onions but before that I’m piling on yet another sweater, snapping up the black umbrella, and heading out into the four o’clocks where the wet leaves will dance in the dusk, and I will breathe the November air redolent with earth and the silence of all things returning to it.

If I’m lucky, someone will have a fire going.