Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes
Autumn: the ambivalent season
Autumn: the ambivalent season
It’s autumn. The favorite season of many. Cool nights. No mosquitoes. Warm days. Some as sweltering as summer. Dips in the lake are refreshing and cause
assorted body parts to shrivel. Wood fires are nice but not necessary. Squirrels busily gather nuts and store them in tool boxes left open in garages, in car engines
of working and non-working cars, and — I imagine — in the hollows of trees. I sometimes wonder if they remember the location of each and every stowed-away
nut. Squirrels get fat and hide food. Humans think about where they put their flannel shirts, winter coats, gloves and scarves while a big part of us still denies the
imminence of winter. Especially on bright, crisp fall days with sumac trees casting purple shadows on the ground as crimson maple leaves shout that a change is
gonna come while the yellow foliage of adjacent trees tries to calm the whole scene by bathing it in warm, golden light.
I lived in the little town of Clyde, Wis. for about six years. In the time I spent there and the surrounding areas of Lone Rock, Avoca, Muscoda and Spring
Green, I don’t remember seeing more than a couple of watches on the wrists of people. And most of the watches I did see were probably on the wrists of people
in Spring Green. Maybe this was the case because many of the people I bumped into on the main street of Spring Green were from other places. Large cities
where watches were required to tell the time because the sun was obscured by exhaust and moonlight was hidden behind the glare of street lights. This may or
may not be true but I doubt if anyone is going to do a master’s thesis on “The Propensity of Indigenous Rural People to Keep Track of Time by Non-Mechanical
Means Compared to Cohorts Who Relocated to Rural Areas” – or something like that. I can’t remember a neighbor ever saying, “It’s 6:20, better call the cows in
for milking.” I think, or romanticize, that the clocks were more internal than that. I like to believe that man-made gadgets like clocks and watches had little to do
with the lives of the people I called neighbors in Clyde.
They knew that the light looked a certain way during a particular time of day and that knowledge had to be blended with the changing of seasons. A fall sky
looks different than a spring sky even though they each mark transitions to the maybe less ambivalent seasons of winter and summer. Possums roam about during
all hours of the day and night in the spring, but you would be hard-pressed to find one during the daytime in summer or at any time of day or night during winter
because, unlike humans, they’re smart enough to hibernate. Just chill out and wait for more hospitable weather. Been doing it for millions of years. No reason to
change now just because this particular batch of humans is starting to talk about Global Warming as if to say that they are, somehow, connected to the weather.
This revelation can hardly be considered news. Not if you are a ‘possum, anyway. Furry caterpillars with brown and black horizontal bands are in abundance in
late-fall. I wonder if they are naked or just hide in cool places during the warmer times of year.
Maybe some of these musings contribute to my intense dislike of Daylight-Savings-Time. I even hated the arrogance of the idea before I had ever set foot
in the country. Does man changing the hands on a clock and mandating that the rest of the country change their clocks really change the speed at which the
earth travels around the sun? Isn’t it the same kind of presumptuous nonsense created by people who got the rest of us thinking about sunrises and sunsets when
the sun does neither? I was fed the line that the time change had something to do with farmers and “giving” them and extra hour to do whatever farmers had to
do in the fall. I always questioned that. Never seemed to make any sense. I always figured that farmers milked their cows when the udders were full. I could not
imagine them saying, “I’d like to milk you now, Bessie, but it’s not quite 6:20 (in the morning or evening) yet. Then I was told that we spring forward and fall back
to provide school children a little extra daylight. Whatever. My best guess is that Daylight-Savings-Time was a non-functioning idea its first day out of the box
and it continues to be a dumb idea and like many not-so-brilliant ideas they are hard as hell to undo because they have become tradition and we sure don’t
want to bump heads with that. Unless, of course, you’re a communist or something like that.
My guess was that people who lived in the country were still a part of instead of apart from the environments they lived in so the need for timepieces was
less. If you live in a big city and the activity is frantic pretty much twenty-four hours a day and the sun is clouded by smog and the moon hides behind seven-
million fluorescent lights and you’ve never seen a star except for the fake ones on television shows about outer space, then you might need a watch to tell you
what time it is. You might need a watch to tell you what time to take a pill to go to sleep and set your alarm clock to tell you what time to get up to take your
wake-up pill and drink your energy drink.
Problem is that there are growing numbers of country people who have to work in the city to earn the checks that will enable them to live in the country.
Problem is that there are growing numbers of people who feel it necessary to impose some arbitrary sense of time and priorities and what it means for them to be
human on who they really feel themselves to be inside. Work is necessarily something to get through in order to have time and the wherewithal to what feels right
and good. Monday through Friday is tolerated in order to get to the week end. We are thankful to the calendar God when we’re granted an extra long week end.
Three whole days. One to regain feeling in our fingers and toes from the circulation we cut off or slowed down in order to survive Monday through Friday. One
day to begin to get reacquainted with ourselves. And a third day to prepare to re-enter the world of work. Maybe that’s why farmers are glorified in this culture.
Not only do they grow the food that is put in the trucks to be shipped to the stores where we buy the cellophane-wrapped morsels to cart home to prepare for our
families. But they make hay while the sun shines. Harvest the corn when it is mature and dry enough. Dig the beets, carrots and potatoes before the ground
freezes. Full bladders used to mean it was time to get up, pee and go back to bed. Now it means get up, pee and get dressed for the night shift. Better set the
alarm clock just in case.
assorted body parts to shrivel. Wood fires are nice but not necessary. Squirrels busily gather nuts and store them in tool boxes left open in garages, in car engines
of working and non-working cars, and — I imagine — in the hollows of trees. I sometimes wonder if they remember the location of each and every stowed-away
nut. Squirrels get fat and hide food. Humans think about where they put their flannel shirts, winter coats, gloves and scarves while a big part of us still denies the
imminence of winter. Especially on bright, crisp fall days with sumac trees casting purple shadows on the ground as crimson maple leaves shout that a change is
gonna come while the yellow foliage of adjacent trees tries to calm the whole scene by bathing it in warm, golden light.
I lived in the little town of Clyde, Wis. for about six years. In the time I spent there and the surrounding areas of Lone Rock, Avoca, Muscoda and Spring
Green, I don’t remember seeing more than a couple of watches on the wrists of people. And most of the watches I did see were probably on the wrists of people
in Spring Green. Maybe this was the case because many of the people I bumped into on the main street of Spring Green were from other places. Large cities
where watches were required to tell the time because the sun was obscured by exhaust and moonlight was hidden behind the glare of street lights. This may or
may not be true but I doubt if anyone is going to do a master’s thesis on “The Propensity of Indigenous Rural People to Keep Track of Time by Non-Mechanical
Means Compared to Cohorts Who Relocated to Rural Areas” – or something like that. I can’t remember a neighbor ever saying, “It’s 6:20, better call the cows in
for milking.” I think, or romanticize, that the clocks were more internal than that. I like to believe that man-made gadgets like clocks and watches had little to do
with the lives of the people I called neighbors in Clyde.
They knew that the light looked a certain way during a particular time of day and that knowledge had to be blended with the changing of seasons. A fall sky
looks different than a spring sky even though they each mark transitions to the maybe less ambivalent seasons of winter and summer. Possums roam about during
all hours of the day and night in the spring, but you would be hard-pressed to find one during the daytime in summer or at any time of day or night during winter
because, unlike humans, they’re smart enough to hibernate. Just chill out and wait for more hospitable weather. Been doing it for millions of years. No reason to
change now just because this particular batch of humans is starting to talk about Global Warming as if to say that they are, somehow, connected to the weather.
This revelation can hardly be considered news. Not if you are a ‘possum, anyway. Furry caterpillars with brown and black horizontal bands are in abundance in
late-fall. I wonder if they are naked or just hide in cool places during the warmer times of year.
Maybe some of these musings contribute to my intense dislike of Daylight-Savings-Time. I even hated the arrogance of the idea before I had ever set foot
in the country. Does man changing the hands on a clock and mandating that the rest of the country change their clocks really change the speed at which the
earth travels around the sun? Isn’t it the same kind of presumptuous nonsense created by people who got the rest of us thinking about sunrises and sunsets when
the sun does neither? I was fed the line that the time change had something to do with farmers and “giving” them and extra hour to do whatever farmers had to
do in the fall. I always questioned that. Never seemed to make any sense. I always figured that farmers milked their cows when the udders were full. I could not
imagine them saying, “I’d like to milk you now, Bessie, but it’s not quite 6:20 (in the morning or evening) yet. Then I was told that we spring forward and fall back
to provide school children a little extra daylight. Whatever. My best guess is that Daylight-Savings-Time was a non-functioning idea its first day out of the box
and it continues to be a dumb idea and like many not-so-brilliant ideas they are hard as hell to undo because they have become tradition and we sure don’t
want to bump heads with that. Unless, of course, you’re a communist or something like that.
My guess was that people who lived in the country were still a part of instead of apart from the environments they lived in so the need for timepieces was
less. If you live in a big city and the activity is frantic pretty much twenty-four hours a day and the sun is clouded by smog and the moon hides behind seven-
million fluorescent lights and you’ve never seen a star except for the fake ones on television shows about outer space, then you might need a watch to tell you
what time it is. You might need a watch to tell you what time to take a pill to go to sleep and set your alarm clock to tell you what time to get up to take your
wake-up pill and drink your energy drink.
Problem is that there are growing numbers of country people who have to work in the city to earn the checks that will enable them to live in the country.
Problem is that there are growing numbers of people who feel it necessary to impose some arbitrary sense of time and priorities and what it means for them to be
human on who they really feel themselves to be inside. Work is necessarily something to get through in order to have time and the wherewithal to what feels right
and good. Monday through Friday is tolerated in order to get to the week end. We are thankful to the calendar God when we’re granted an extra long week end.
Three whole days. One to regain feeling in our fingers and toes from the circulation we cut off or slowed down in order to survive Monday through Friday. One
day to begin to get reacquainted with ourselves. And a third day to prepare to re-enter the world of work. Maybe that’s why farmers are glorified in this culture.
Not only do they grow the food that is put in the trucks to be shipped to the stores where we buy the cellophane-wrapped morsels to cart home to prepare for our
families. But they make hay while the sun shines. Harvest the corn when it is mature and dry enough. Dig the beets, carrots and potatoes before the ground
freezes. Full bladders used to mean it was time to get up, pee and go back to bed. Now it means get up, pee and get dressed for the night shift. Better set the
alarm clock just in case.