November. If I were to
choose one month to describe the place I live or the songs I sing or the
stories I write it would be November: the trees bare, the ground gray and tawny
and umber, the sky at last visible through the branches. In other words: stark.
Like Stark Road, which joins MacArthur a quarter-mile uphill, named after Molly
Stark, the revolutionary war hero. And like Route 9, the federal highway at the
foot of our road also known as “The Molly Stark Trail” because it is the route
Molly walked two-hundred-plus years ago when it was no more than a trail. And
so MacArthur—this road I live on, named after my grandparents and their
determined hubris to make a home out of an abandoned homestead up an otherwise
empty logging road—is a bridge between The Molly Stark Trail and Stark Road. A
bridge, then, between Stark’s staccato sounds: sharp-pointed t’s and k’s like
the whetstones, used for sharpening knives, that line the brook our road runs
along. But Molly? What muted loveliness is in that name! M and l’s and rolling
vowels. And November? It has my
favorite letter in it—v—and my favorite vowel—o. It’s thus the bare trees and
the cold ground but the woodstove, too. It’s the wool sweater and
the leather boots and the crunch of leaves and the walk through them. It’s deer
in the garden and hunting season’s rifles and the last stray geese. And that
three-syllable lilting song-ness of it—No-vem-ber? Is the muted lullaby, the quiet, still, clarity this month allows before the bright frenzy of December with its soft c and all the glittering s’s of “Christmas lights.” And so, November: the
great window, in all my favorite colors. Through which the light—gray and clear
and luminous—makes its way through the dark (stark) branches above.
