the samaras are falling

This morning, walking back to the car after my swim (12 degrees, a kingfisher skimming the surface of the lake, one island still dark, the other bright with early sun), I stopped to pick up this cluster of samaras, the winged seeds of big-leaf maples. Chartreuse and magenta. Take a photograph, I asked John, who had his phone with him. It feels early for samaras, early for the morning temperatures to be so cool. Early to be the only one in the lake while the sun takes its own sweet time to rise over the shoulder of the mountain.

Yesterday I made grape jelly, 11 jars of the most beautiful rosé preserve. I used our Chardonnay grapes mostly, tart and green, with just a handful of red wine grapes (Marechal Foch, I think, planted when we built the first extension of our house and wanted vines to cool the southern wall, so 1986 or 7?). I put a small sprig of rosemary on top of the jelly before sealing the jars. There was a little left over, enough for John’s toast this morning. (He said it’s delicious.)

I am writing down the days, the winged samaras, the jars of grape jelly, the trio of Steller’s jays waiting most mornings. The chickadees alighting on my hands as I take out some seed. The mother bear and her two cubs who came the day before yesterday, in daylight, to eat crabapples, the young ones in the tree, swaying on the upper branches, and the mum on her hind legs like a slow dancer, moving from side to side as she plucked the small sour fruit. When we saw them climbing the bank from the old orchard, one of the cubs racing ahead and the other at its mother’s heels, John said, They are so beautiful. And oh, they were, they are, their black coats swaying, their bodies somehow sinuous despite the bulk. (I must remember this.) I think of how rich a life can feel some days, for jars for grape jelly on a cloth by the stove, the vivid blue of Steller’s jays against the deep green firs, a pile of books by the bed, the scent of apples in the back of the house from the bags stored there, Merton Beauties, Bob Dylan singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (I confess to pressing repeat), and the arrival, like clockwork, of the bears for the crabapples. I know Louis MacNeice didn’t have a mature black bear in mind when he wrote “Autumn Journal” but somehow I am thinking of his lines this morning, September light in the trees, my bathing suit drying on the railing, and a sprig of leftover rosemary on the counter, for remembrance:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow