The First Hard Frost

Many things things are pegged to the “first hard frost.” The end of skeeter season. The time when chokecherries turn sweet enough to pick. The time to lift potatoes. And the time when I switch from salads to casseroles. Corned beef hash becomes my favorite breakfast and sausage with cheese replaces cottage cheese. The flannel sheets go on the bed and big woolly nighties replace the thin cotton one with tucks and embroidery. I can’t think what I did before size 3X men’s fleece shirts, because now I wear them over everything, around the clock, though they come off in the afternoon if I’m working and the sun is shining. All the poplar leaves have turned and dropped. That’s my work for a week or so.

This morning I drove to Cut Bank for a little grocery booster -- not that I really needed anything particular except cat food (always) but that the day is the chill crystalline clarity of the first morning after a hard frost. The clouds of the recent snowstorm have gone, leaving the mountains white with snow. This could mean the recharging of the Valier municipal wells, but maybe not. By nightfall the mountains may be back to stony and the water in the wells no higher.

Women who garden are “putting their gardens to bed.” Mine has been sprawling and groaning all summer, so it will be glad to go. There was never quite enough sun, nor quite enough water though there was plenty enough at the right time to get the grass growing like mad -- “I am the grass; I cover all.” Just not enough for roses or hollyhocks. Maybe it was my fault -- maybe I didn’t do the right things at the right time. I’ve lived in apartments most of my life. Even with Bob there was no hope of a lawn or garden with horses and badgers at large.

Gutters are on my short list, the poplar leaves stacked into them like coins on edge. Gutters are one of the structural Achilles’ heels of this house. I’m sure water is going into the walls in several places, a desperately serious matter. I figure that when I sell a book I’ll rebuild one side at a time, replacing the asbestos shingles with stucco as I go. On the last coat of stucco I’ll make big Celtic spirals.

Last night I watched my ancient tape of “Excalibur,” which I acquired when I was teaching “Idylls of the King” in Heart Butte. The senior class, which traditionally is the year one studies English lit, consisted of four or five young men -- no longer children, and selective about the days they chose to come to school. On a day like this one, I would not hope to see any of them. But the day I had scheduled “Excalibur,” a sort of adult precursor to “The Lord of the Rings” and maybe “Gladiator,” one showed up. Surprisingly, he was VERY excited to finally see “Excalibur,” said he’d been yearning to see this movie! It is full of violence and nudity, dire threats and terrifying sights -- for years afterwards I dreamt of the tree where the failed knights hung and an eerie child in golden armor laughed mockingly. Some might criticize me for showing the movie, but this boy in particular already had his own child, was mourning his best friend’s death in a trailer fire, had been in near fatal car accidents.

The movie was full of fires and fog. I thought of them this morning as I topped Buffalo Ridge and saw that Cut Bank was entirely obscured by a blue roll of fog. “The Dragon’s Breath,” Merlin kept calling it in the movie. I entered the fog bank just past where Lewis and his small scouting party killed two Blackfeet about the age of that Heart Butte senior class and stopped at the info kiosk to see if I could recognize the exact spot. We went there in the Sixties when it was first located. The kiosk features a photo of the fatal spot but FROM the spot, not AT the spot. The location is on private property and the rancher doesn’t welcome visitors so... a bit of sleight of hand.

The huge straw bales are still spaced in the fields up north, as though waiting to be arranged into a Stonehenge, but they are only drying. If the right combination of dampness seizes them, they burst into spontaneous combustion. I saw one once, merrily burning away out there in the field, a bale that refused to meet its fate in a cow, a bale intent on the dramatic, the exceptional. No rancher or fireman had arrived to deal with the renegade.

It’s bird hunting season: at dawn a few days ago when there was shooting by the lake, the cats and I raised our heads. Befuddled by dreams, we went back to sleep. First hard frost. Expected and yet shocking, transformative and yet paralyzing. An ambiguous event but one that demands definite preparations: bring in the latex paint from the garage, cover the outdoor hose bib with insulation instead of detaching it from the house plumbing because it might be possible to give the trees one more soaking. If the Black Willow doesn’t get enough water at bedtime, it won’t drop its leaves -- just let them dry in place. But I depend on those leaves coming down so I get sunshine on the south side all winter. One year I threatened to just climb up there and pick off the leaves one by one!

I’m reading “Warriors of the Wasteland: A Quest for the Pagan Sacrificial Cult behind the Grail Legend,” by John Grigsby. King Arthur, the wounded “thigh,” the search for the healing chalice -- and the answer to the question is “the king and the land are one.” At the “Round Table” of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment they’re arguing about whether discussions of nature ought to be sexy. They need a good hard frost.