November

There should be a November song, but I don't know any. We are here again, another fall has come and winter's around the corner, but this time it is really different. The cold has arrived; the sere colors of New England's deciduous trees abounds. The summer people have long gone; the vegetables changed from tomatoes and lettuce to pumpkins and squash and now they themselves have all but closed, filling up instead with Christmas ornaments and chotzkhis, desperately marked up, impulse shopping junk to briefly sate the compulsion to buy, to fill to squander. And the rain and wind have increased dramatically, especially this year, with the highest recorded rainfall in a hundred years in the region. It is different this time because we are finally moving from New York, house sold, books and bureaus packed. It will not be very much longer now until we are Rhode Island residents, no longer New Yorkers. As with most things, it is a bittersweet resolution. We will miss people, places and longevity in a place which is irreplaceable, but it is not as though we do not have longevity in our "new" home. I have lived here since the first month of my life, and so has my daughter, and my wife may as well have. She's been coming here for nearly thirty years. The change has been good, on balance, and although I thought twelve months ago it would have been a picnic and it has been more like a cliff walk or dancing on a bed of coals, we are but a step away from making it intact. Scathed, but intact. And this is a good thing. Moving on, moving forward. I have been watching a flock of gulls working the bay between Brown and Church, and I am mystified. In honor of the find day, of the mystery and my curiosity about what it is they are following, I am going to risk my perfect record fishing and make a few casts into the Sakonnet. I can accept no fish or a blemished record for the privilege of the exercise. My last 'fish' of the year. Who knows. It's November, and I am here by the sea, fishing! It's amazing, man!