I always look forward to November. When it is here, I enjoy it to the fullest. Sunrises and sunsets are brighter, and the “Golden Hour” right after sunset brings out the colors in the leaves. For some reason the month reminds me of my late friend Lex. He was a gentle giant of a man, quiet, a warm smile, and gentle, never audaciously flashy or boastful or loud. That’s my idea of a great November, too. With the exception of Veterans Day and Thanksgiving, there are no major holidays, nor even many minor ones. After a full summer and autumn, we are ready for some quiet gentleness before we launch into the holiday season.
November is a steady friend. Sure, there is less sunlight each day, and the days cool off and become cold. Here in Michigan, we expect that. The month isn’t like April or May where there is the constant betrayal of warm weather one day, and then sleet the next. November is straight forward and honest, and that makes it a good neighbor.
Many of us want to finish the outside work before it gets too cold, and November reminds us to get on with it. Water hoses have to come off the outdoor spigots, windows made as airtight as possible, and air conditioners either covered or stored. There is yard and garden work to be done, but we are not pressed to do everything right away. No one is coming for a garden party this time of year. Besides, a hard frost and snow will take care of the weeds. We don’t even have to get every leaf off the property because our neighbors, you know, the ones who are not familiar with rakes and leaf blowers, will let the wind clear their leaves onto our place.
The important thing is to remember where we dropped the rake so we don’t trip over it next spring. What I miss is the smell of a bonfire full of leaves. That’s November for you, a time of gentle memories from our past.
On the subject of leaf-blowers, I am claiming credit for inventing them. I came up with the idea on a November afternoon when I was in the fifth grade. It was years before Toro or any of the other manufacturers borrowed my idea. One afternoon, when she wasn’t looking, I took Mother’s Hoover cannister vacuum cleaner outside, put the hose in the reverse end so it blew out air, and went to work on the grass. It did not work that well, but a brainiac friend of mine suggested if we had a bigger motor we would be on to something. I could have been a pre-teen millionaire except Mother caught on to what we were doing, shot out the door, and ‘suggested’ we return her vacuum to the closet both toot and sweet. It came with the most dire of all threat, “Just wait until your father comes home.” Secretly, I think she was impressed with our ingenuity. I am sure of it even if she never admitted it.
I was fortunate to grow up in an era when ring-necked pheasant abounded in our area. We would hear them squawk throughout the summer; one autumn we saw a large flock running across our lawn to the woods on the other side of our property. We had huge V shaped formations of giant Canada geese flying over our house. There were even bigger flocks of starlings that would land in our trees. Dad bought me a pair of Roy Roger cap pistols and boxes of tightly wound coils of red caps. I was dispatched outside to fire away so the starlings would fly off before they had much opportunity to leave their calling cards on the Buick. And always the warning, “Don’t look up with your mouth open!”
This quiet gentle giant of a month allows us time to let some other memories filter to the surface. For me, another one of them was the Church Basement Lutefisk Dinner Circuit. Even in Minnesota and for those of Norwegian heritage, lutefisk is something of a cliché and joke. It’s cod, dried, soaked in lye, and shipped from Oslo to the Norwegian ghettos of America, boiled to get the poison out, and served. The stuff has a smell that will take the roses off the wallpaper, but for the church basement kitchen basement ladies who prepared it, it was serious business.
Some of the farmers rushed through their evening chores and did not have time to change before they drove over to their church. Suffice it to note that the combination of fresh barnyard organic fertilizer clinging to their boots, mixed with the smells from the kitchen, remain memorable. Other churches and organizations also sponsored their own dinners, often meatloaf and potatoes, chicken, or spaghetti.
It is the month, regardless of the weather, where veterans assemble at the Legion or VFW Halls. While they are hanging around, one of the older ones is sure to bring up the Great Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940, when several hundred people died in an unexpected full-bore blizzard here in the Upper Midwest. Then, at the appointed time, they will fall in behind the Color Guard to march to the war memorial. There, we pray for those who have served and ar no longer with us, and are reminded how when they were discharged they came home to build this nation into what it is today. For most of us, it is an important patriotic day, but a quiet one.
The highlight of the month arrives on the last Thursday - Thanksgiving Day. We know there is a lot of myth and story attached to this day, and that is just fine. It is the essence of the day, rather than the historic accuracy that matters. We know the important truth of intentionally pausing to give thanks for what we have, as well as for some of the “great ideas” we had, and for which we are now thankful did not happen. Or, for the things that did not happen, such as auto accidents, illness, and fractured relationships.
Thanksgiving was a day of chaos and anxiety, especially for Mother. We always had guests, so everything had to be perfect. Among the guests were some of the sister-in-laws, and that inevitably led to tension in the kitchen. A well-fed aunt would always enjoy just one more little taste. Another one snitched some food and put it into a paper napkin for a later snack that migrated to an over-sized handbag and had no idea we were on to her.
After the great feast, Father and my uncles would push back from the dining room table to wobble into the living room. Along the way, they picked up a section of the newspaper from earlier in the week. They would soon settle into a chair or the sofa, look around to make sure it was a solely male domain, and cautiously unbuckle their belt and loosen the top button of their trousers. The unfolded newspaper was carefully positioned on their lap. Let the snoring begin!
We listened, not watched, the football games that afternoon. All of The Old Gents were united in their belief that radio was better because television did not do the game justice. Not that it mattered to me because I was persistently called to make adjustments. If it was television, then I would be summoned to turn the Motorola rotor a bit or go outside to scare the birds off the antenna. Since we used radio, I had to adjust the tuning on the Atwater Kent from time to time.
I was stuck in a room full of old men (probably in their 50s, which is NOT old anymore) snoring away. It was not long after that an aunt would come in to the “front room parlor” as The Olds called a living room, and deposit herself on the piano bench. For the next half hour she played Christmas carols. A decade or so later, when her mind was away with the fairies, she played There’s a Song in the Air repeatedly, like a broken record, until someone told her to knock it off.
When the guests were out the door, November was unofficially over for another year. We had created new memories that stay in the recesses of our mind until we are outside raking leaves again.
November is a pure bonus for us. You have your own memories to revisit, and I hope you do bring them to mind. Now, go out and create new ones.
