WHAT TO DO IN NOVEMBER

What is there to say about November?  It’s all about waiting.  It’s about absence.  

The very last yellow leaf that held on for dear life, even in the strongest wind, is gone.  Disappeared.  It seems to have happened when I wasn’t looking.  The geese aren’t flying overhead any more.  No ducks are visiting the pond.  Hummingbirds are a distant memory; I think they checked the calendar one day and took off even before there were signs that summer was planning to turn into fall.  I can only wonder what became of the muskrat family that holed up by the pond or the weasels that lived under the patio.  The hawks and turkey vultures disappeared too, after days of graceful swooping across the fields, fields they have now abandoned to the crows.  Squirrels and chipmunks are all I’ve seen of mammals lately.  Not even deer.  It’s rifle season for deer as of November 1^st and they’re not likely to make themselves known.  Yet––and of course there’s an “and yet”––it is still beautiful, especially on clear sunny day that last only until 4:30 in the afternoon when the light turns yellow.

Late afternoon light on the fireplace wall

 NOT November on the Robert Frost Trail:  October fondly remembered

It has in fact been more sunny than dark from September until now.  Our solar panels have generated more kilowatt hours from January to December than they did last year.   (We got the panels halfway through June of 2013.)  One way to measure this by comparing the solar credits we have from Green Mountain Power compared with last year: over $1,700 as of November 1^st , $200 more than last year.  This was not profit as we pay (leasing) for the panels.  So far they have provided 39,000 kilowatt hours since June 2013 and offset 30 tons of carbon emissions.  What is amazing about solar power here in Vermont is how much of it there is throughout the state.  I’m impressed at what Vermont is doing in the direction of carbon neutrality.  Solar companies are putting up arrays with great enthusiasm.  So much so that array siting has become an aesthetic issue.  There is a backlash against very large arrays, say, five acres or more.  I happen like the way our three panels look.  They tend to disappear into the background from most angles and they are far from the road.  However, this isn’t the case everywhere.  In some locations they are unshielded and smack against a road.  In other places large arrays it’s a question of the acreage they cover.  It’s also just the fact that they cover:  panels create ground shade where there would otherwise be sunlight, removing yet another potential area from bobolink territory; these are birds who will not nest in or near shaded areas, and like so many ground-nesting species, they are vulnerable not only to natural predators, but cats and, notably, mowing equipment.  It’s is why in many fields late season haying is their only ticket to survival. 

An ugly solar array in Middlebury at Vermont Sun Fitness Center; across the street is the Cabot Creamery.

On the other side of the season’s arc, fall instead of spring, the maple syrup ritual was replaced by apple cider time.  Our apple trees produced delicious, if seriously misshapen, apples this year on two of our four trees.  Since you don’t need to have male and female apple trees for fruiting (unlike holly, for example), I can’t understand why we have two productive trees and two utterly stubbornly unproductive trees.  Ideas, anyone?  The apples produced by the Good Two trees were deep red and tart, like Empire apples. They made the tastiest applesauce I’ve ever eaten, but, alas, only after endless and tiresome peeling and trimming of their bumpy, crooked bodies.  The Bad Two made nothing whatsoever.  They didn't even try.  Our Huston family next door has several huge old apple trees, plenty of apples for making cider, and then some.  The biggest obstacle to churning out cider is the challenge of efficiently turning whole apples into small chunks for juicing in the press.  A while back the Goudey family came up with the idea of using a garbage disposal that got attached to an old sink the Hustons supplied that turned the apples into mush before they went into the press.  Running the press then became a piece of cake. 

The sink with garbage disposal arrangement for cider-making

Apple cider.  Pumpkins, pumpkin pie. A lot of what's left of November is taken up with planning for Thanksgiving.  

Nothing else to do then but wait for the snow.