Field Notes: Newnham in Autumn

Yesterday brought the first early-morning snow of winter to Cambridge. Having been tipped off by the forecast the day before, I knew what the muffled calls and screams of children meant when they woke me up, even with the curtains closed and my brain still groggy. Within a few hours of sunrise, the half-inch of snow was latticed into slush on the lawns and rooftops, and soon after that, was gone. (Having spent nine Decembers in Idaho, I’m not impressed.)

Today brought near-frozen sunshine, which I’m now watching gather into sunset just after 3 pm. The walnut tree outside my window is all a-crag with empty branches; I can only see a single leaf clinging and waving.

All this is to say that winter is here. So my post today is a tribute to the memory of the glorious autumn I was so unusually intimate with here in Newnham, working at my south-facing window in my college room, taking strolls for breaks. Here are some of my field notes.

20 Oct

A sun-touched afternoon:

The maple across the lane sends bronze-yellow leaves twirling and skating to our asphalt, stems longer than the leaves are broad. Down the street another maple has glown-up neon yellow, buttery in the sun. Ivy umbels are exuberantly round and in bloom, mostly anthers, visited by bees and flies and wasps and bumblebees—one Bombus the biggest I’ve ever seen, the size of one of the umbels, bold black, yellow, white. A small green spider with yellow splotches, like a lightened ivy leaf, spins a scrim of web across one curving leaf, making a tent. The splashes of impossibly red leaves behind hedges and between buildings are almost viscerally thrilling. I’m absorbing warmth and light clear air like a sponge.

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21 Oct

Rain:

I can’t see it in the air through my window, except where it’s sliding and blinking off of leaves. It’s a spackled web of sound instead, and cool freshness wafting in.

31 Oct

A corner of the Newnham garden:

What kind of tree? There are bristly pods, quad-lipped tips just beginning to pull open; leaves messily amber yet neatly veined, small and rounded, shivering in long splaying lines across the sky, catching the brief flare of sun. The bark is smooth and grey rendered green by algae. The whole tree gasps when the wind picks up. Leaf buds long and elegant wine red, waiting. They’re sharp! Lichen has layered in pleasing warm mint ruffles and funny tiny cups, even on small branchlets. The sun glistens long and cool on wet leaves. Robin song, also gleam-y, silvery.

Ah, it’s a beech. Fagus sylvatica.

Someone else like me stops under a nearby tree and fingers heart-shaped yellow leaves lit by sun. Common lime: Tilia x europaea.

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2 Nov

Magpie:

Satin black and perfect white, grasps tree branch with twig toes, surveys wind-sun-walnut-leaf-yellow-halo from swinging perch, curves black neck and levers black tail down, patches of yin and yang balanced between.

10 Nov

Perfect autumn sun after rain:

Yellow leaves bask; leaves and gem-drops fall tranquilly, tapping branches and the ground; web-gleam, bug-drift in sunlight; how can I describe the luminosity, the quiet flames around the dark trunks, filling dimensions felt as much as seen? The moving clouds quench this wonder so completely—this has come into my dreams, the brilliance and color of sunlight and a dark wall of gray leaping to cover it. Reality is more subtle, but the give and take is constant.

11 Nov

Between two bricks in a garden wall:

Mortar turned to jewel-green moss with its tiny grove of calyptra, spore-bearing pods on hair-thin stalks; pale glossy fruiting bodies from a toehold of fungus.

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12 Nov

Southern-slung autumn sun:

Turns leaves to stained-glass swan song. Maple is still one-third green; walnut and beech are just clinging to last scattering of yellow-gold-amber. Seagulls and jet trails slice white across bright simple blue. Tree rustles, leaves skitter on pavement. Sun in the rooftop-tree gap dances searingly, like a half-veiled god, with grace to warm my legs. I feel like I’m inhaling sky blue, pressed leaf-light, dark wood-lines—what else could be inside me now?

15 Nov

Between-rain Sunday morning walk:

A lush gray quiet on the streets, branches restless, sycamore leaves in damp caramel decay on wet asphalt. Squirrel leaps a puddle, skitters up a sycamore. Single magpie, distant joggers, slap of their feet gradually catching up with me. Great tits busy in the hedge; scatter of jackdaws, swoosh of wood pigeon. Musical burble under the amber leaves in the gutter: hidden rain-drain. Beech shoulders, gray and bare, draped with long fringes of rain-soak trailing down the trunk.

Sun blazes out in the Newnham garden:

Leaves cartwheel over the lawn, burnished and dark or bright and light. Gulls and pigeons careen expertly on the billowing blue. Flash of gold in bare plane tree: Selwyn’s weathervane turning on the other side of the road. Walking into the sun: everything glinting and shivering; cold current skims steadily over face and fingers.

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17 Nov

Partly cloudy:

Soft leaf shadows on beech trunk, soft cold breeze on my face, in the leaves. Three kinds of motor running (sky, road, lawn). Walnut branches: many angles, coarse fractal scraggle. Maple branches: long lines end in dainty crimps. Beech branches: fine frizzle of branchlets haloes wild curves. Walnut bark: furrowed. Maple bark: scalloped with frowns. Beech bark: smooth.

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18 Nov

Morning window sun:

Announces a festival among the shimmering banners of spidersilk, iridescence embroidering the glow-haze of the dusty windowpane. My room is full of color. One perfectly round web the size of my palm has tiny crumb of a spider at the very center.

Walking through the Newnham garden at night:

Equal parts stirring leaves, hazy star gazing, and the spaced-out glare of lights against brick.

19 Nov

Newnham garden:

Piccolo notes of little blue tits in the climbing clematis, last spray of yellow leaves on the lime tree, perfect red brick, dry rustle of English oak, all orange-brown scalloped edges; birch leaves like coins scattered on the lawn.

Thirty minutes to sunset:

Sun is a golden blaze behind trees and the sky is a layered feathered tapestry of clouds glowing a strange beautiful yellow-green to ochre-grey over the dark-bodied grey of rain, torn softly at the edges against vibrant blue sky. Everything washed in this thin glow, luminous glaze. Moon a sliver in the southern sky. Somewhere very high, a sparkle: a flock of gulls circling against the gray, flashing their luminous white on and off like lightning bugs, shoaling fish. Slowly the strange yellow yields to sunset pink.

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22 Nov

Glance up at blue sky:

Long enough to realize with a sizzle in the blood that the two robust, long-tailed bird profiles overhead are not pigeons but raptors, merlins or sparrowhawks, with streaked breasts, barred tails. Both mid-drift on lazy looping currents that soon drop them behind trees and roof.

28 Nov

Cold, moist, misty day:

Gray threaded with reedy bird twitters—where? Ah, a whole flock of songbirds feeding and fluting in the tree with weird berries, the yellow-flowered shrub, the yew—blue tits, long-tailed tits, kinglet, great tit tweeting and churring; so many silvery sounds weaving; buzz-blur of wings from branch to branch. Crows and jackdaws are hulking black on the wing and in the far tall bare trees. I can hear their wings cascading softly from a pine. Rattle of magpie, robin eloquence. Do they all understand each other, is it only we species-strangers who don’t?

29 Nov

An intersection:

Bare looped branch in hedge gap, blackbird with bright orange beak perched quietly in profile, me walking, not too far in daydream for the corner of my eye to catch the framing. I look, beak opens, bird flies.

3 Dec

Cold rain all day:

Glaze and gleam. Beech buds, slender spears, have the biggest beads of silver light, distilling what day can be drawn from the gray. Ivy berries, dusky plum-colored, are luscious with sparkle; leaves are rich, green, and shining. Winter.

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