WE ARE ALL USHER

It is noon. It is grey. It's hard to tell if the damp excretions of the sky are sleet mixed with rain, or rain mixed with sleet. The beautiful golden, orange and brick leaves of the maple and birch are all gone, sodden heaps in back yards and compost piles, and only a few stubborn long brown oak leaves hang, bat-like, from the last holdouts along the streets. It is Fall, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Fall is really two seasons here in Maine. First come those crisp days and cool nights, the leaves changing color and taking their time about falling. These are still days when one can paint, or clean out the car, or do yard work or play ball without the weather being any kind of obstacle. That's the nice Fall.
Then comes Fall: Part Two. Like the middle volume of Tolkien's trilogy, also with the word Two prominently displayed, it is a heavy time, a thing of gloom. It's Mahler, it's Mussorgsky, telling us that Things Are Not Good, and Worse Is Yet To Come. It's an old humorless pastor, bearded and hopeless, telling the uneasy congregation that their number is almost up, and they had better get their affairs in order. This part of Fall features pane-rattling winds, those first bone-chilling damp breezes, reminders of tasks left undone until it is Too Late, and hints of Greater Misery To Come.
Great.
But for all its minor key histrionics, Fall: Part Two is in its own way a reprieve-- there is still time to get the snow tires on, to throw some wood in the basement, to caulk some leaking window frames, to find the boots and coats and mittens and scarves, to put an ice scraper in each car, to run some dry gas through the car before the first hard freeze, to find the snow shovels and roof rakes and bags of hardened salt (oh well) and buckets of sand.
So we try to get our acts together and we try to prepare, and we hunker and we wait, not really remembering that Winter, when it comes, will not be as bad as all that, and that the blinding snow in its own way is cheering and refreshing.