A November Vignette

November.

November is that indeterminate blank of time caught between autumn and winter, reluctant to loosen its grasp on the light and warmth of autumn, but slipping inexorably, a reminder of time’s unyielding progression, towards winter. The scarlets and coppers and saffrons of September and October have long faded into brown, desiccated hulls fluttering and rattling in the wind. There was a period when the foliage, bright and plentiful, came flopping wetly down to plaster the pavement in little leaf-shaped cutouts every time it rained, or drifted, in a whirlwind of colour, to settle upon the lawn while the sun was still high.

But now the palette has changed. Browns and greys and beiges, muted by the haze of November, a name under which these colours fall. The sky, no longer piled with the cottony white cumulus of summer, settles into iron-grey blankets that lie low and flat and heavily across the sky. Trees are stripped to their skeletons, stems and stalks whisper and sigh, and humans begin to don garments in hues with such names as camel or charcoal or sepia or maroon, and they, too, adapt to the November landscape.

Rain, hanging in a cold, drizzly mist (or torrential downpours, as yesterday’s). Wind, stiff and dull, almost biting, but not enough so to be bitter. The sun weakens towards watery, when it shows. Breaths begin to mist first at night, then gradually during the day, some days.

Somewhere, a flock of crows has roosted, the black of their plumage invisible against the darkness, but their raucous conversation lasting well into the night. Sunsets slip closer, alighting unexpectedly earlier and earlier. Grey days bleed into one another, and November passes.