ERIC'S BIT or FALL IN THE AIR
This morning I picked up extra canned goods at the grocery. We're stocking up for the winter. Being snowed in is more tolerable when the shelves are full.
Driving home I realized it felt like autumn. The sky seemed bigger. The light fell less heavily across the fields and mountains. Maybe it had to do with the angle of the sun, or the thinning foliage.
It was around this time of year that my grandfather built the corn hut in the midst of the soon-to-be frozen furrows in the back garden. Corn shocks lashed to a wooden framework formed the walls and roof. Wheelbarrows-full of fragrant pine needles cushioned the floor. A canvas drop cloth hung from the doorway kept out the wind.
My friends and I used it all through November until winter's snows and winds brought it down. Inside, the air was a still, frigid pool, colder than outside, until you became accustomed to it. We would sit with a flashlight in the springy pine needles, exhaling luminous clouds, while we laid out plans for the week.
By the end of November, the garden was frozen. The remains of the hills from which the potatoes had been unearthed, the craters marking where the largest of the rutabagas had been pulled up, would remain, fossilized, until spring, along with the straight rows of corn stubble and tangles of blackened vines.
When we ventured out from the hut to explore we always found a few enormous cucumbers and a squash or two that had hidden successfully beneath the vines and eluded harvest. By November, their camouflage had withered, and they lay exposed, misshapen, frost-bitten and half translucent, preserved in the midst of decay.
It was in the corn hut that I traded my complete set of Davy Crockett bubble gum cards for some plastic trucks I can barely recall. I had collected the cards over the course of a sweltering summer. That was another world, and what had happened there no longer seemed important in November.
I was remembering the corn hut when I hauled my winter supplies into our house, which is somewhat larger and a bit warmer than the hut. Maybe a primitive internal clock was warning me that winter was on the way. An instinct we humans still have that senses things we can't quite identify rationally, urges us to buy large cans of tomato sauce and extra bottles of curry powder. To seek shelter, nestle down in pine needles, or turn on the space heater.
AND FINALLY
Speaking of cold weather, not to mention misery, we'll return on December 15th to leap back into your email inbox with the next issue of Orphan Scrivener tucked securely under our arms.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual
suspects, including more personal essays, our bibliography, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit our shadow identity M. E. Mayer's blog at http://memayer.blogspot.com/ And just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales and our author page is at https://www.amazon.com/author/reedmayer Drop in some time!
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