When September Days Are Here

Favorite Seasons

When squirrels are harvesting, and birds in flight appear,

By all these lovely tokens we know - September days are here.

- Helen Hunt Jackson

It is one of those taut September days. Everywhere, there's a distilled sense of perception, a sparseness, every line firm and unredundant. The leaves are beginning to turn, and nothing is wasted or goes unseen. 

Walking in the garden, I feel the first intimation of fall in the air - that smell of a decadent, overripe autumn, rich and swollen. It is crisp and windless, with the clouds overhead looking like perfect cutouts of themselves. It is still hot outside, though the sun has begun to lean to the west.

Overhead, against a sky full of yellow dust, I see the leaves of the dogwood tree beginning to blush with a tinge of color. The wind puffs its branches, and tiny yellow leaves drift down into the shade.

I pause to inspect my valiant hosta which is holding its long, pendulous white petals erect, snuggled among the stubborn green of the mint leaves, but the yellowing foliage of the hibiscus has never looked so sad. As well, the morning glory vine has dropped off its dying flowers, leaving behind small, round pods at the end of a drooping stem. Summer has ended.

Sitting on the front porch's small landing, I watch the patch of black-eyed Susan tuck itself in for the night. The heat of the day has slithered away like an unwanted guest, reluctantly letting in a teasing chill.
    
Just as I begin to flop back to savor the blissful moment, an obstinate ash maple leaf is dislodged in the wind and gracefully spirals onto my lap. I perk up to the playful nudge and say loudly, Well, hello! 

When September days are here is my favorite season - bringing summer's best of weather and autumn's best of cheer. 

When Birds Flock In The Evening

Favorite Seasons

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - 

and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all. 

- Emily Dickinson

The sun is going down, its rays brought home to roost. I inch toward the window and raise my face, squinting at the edge of the back garden. The shadows have begun to lengthen. The night is quiet.

Then a chatter begins to throb in the darkness. A trio of baby squirrels who have claimed the neighbor's wood pile for their playground are skittering away. The crickets, joined by one bellowing frog, are serenading the stars with their evening melody. 

Above, in the clump of green ash trees, their leaves shimmering with imaginary breeze, I sense the pulsing rhythm of movement and echoes. I perk up to the red-winged blackbird calling, Conk-la-ree, counterpointed by the fast trill with a very sharp staccato quality of gathering blackburnian warblers. 

Chirr, chirr. Fat, orange-breasted robins gab in their nest, the sound rising in volume like a chuckle from the dogwood tree overhead. 

I scrunch up my brow when inside my field of peripheral vision, a bird calling, Dee-dee, goes past, but then my eyes light up in recognition. It's a chickadee, I can tell, because of its dee notes. The song sparrows on the ash-leaf maple tree branch look irritated and fly off. An impish grin lights up my knowing gaze. They're stuttering their displeasure at being disturbed.

At a distance, a mourning dove calls out its low, fluted notes into the blackness. I screw my face up in concentration, but turn around quickly with a half-smile to the rushing sound of wings as a meadowlark lands, and swifts and pigeons glide their way and settle back on the eaves.

The yard has become an amphitheater resonant with the sing-song babbling of a winged throng. Espérance. Its spark and buzz are bursting with hope. I puff up my chest and beam.

It is my favorite season, when birds flock in the evening, making yet another casual stop on its endless way to the future.

When Fireflies Burn Brightly In The Night

Favorite Seasons

Firefly! Firefly! burning bright in the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye could frame thy glowing symmetry? 

- Adapted from Blake's The Tyger

Holding a hand up to my brow, I squint into the peach-colored evening sunlight. The dying sun has left only a faint gleam in the western sky over the Mitai Maori village in New Zealand. 

Tonight's after-dinner treat is a visit in Rotorua to see glow worms in their natural habitat. Perfect, I mutter. Lightning bugs, fireflies, alitaptap in the Filipino vernacular - by whichever name, these bio-luminescent bugs enchant me. 

The tall reeds whisper in the breeze as night sounds rise and fall around them. As I gingerly step across the damp, dark bank along the Wai-o-whiro stream, I recall how, according to Philippine legend, the alitaptap used to be just small and ordinary insects that came out only during the day. They did not have that special fire that kindles light at night. They rested under the leaves and flowers of plants as soon as darkness covered the land. 

But one night, the pretty sampaguita bush under which they hid inspired them to no longer be afraid of the dark and of the fruit bats that threatened to eat them up. I've got an idea. I will tell you just what you should do, said the sampaguita.

Well, what? the insects asked. Each of you will carry a torch of fire, she replied. Then make your way in groups when you go out in the night. The fruit bats will be afraid of you. They won't try to get close to you without getting burned.

And that's what the fireflies did. They were like high-flying embers altogether, and the fruit bats did not dare get near them at all. That was how and why the alitaptap today have a light at the end of their tails. 

We're here! Our tā moko-tattoed Maori guide interrupts my thought.

I peer into the water, its depth illuminated with an eerie blue light. It looks frosty and full of stars... no, glow worms! - flickering and diving, embroidering the black velvet water with an ethereal strangeness.

It is an imposing mural of radiance, showing like brush strokes on an oiled surface. Slim prisms of the moonlight catch the glow worms' stray beams like butterflies in a net and release them across the water in a flurry of a thousand wings and a thousand colors. 

I look up from face to face among the group standing by the lake with me, a luster like the luminous unseen catching on gleaming foreheads, and hear soft voices. All have melded into a throbbing night sorcery, dim and unfocused, as though a gauzy material had floated between earth and sky.

I revel at the timelessness of it all.

A night such as this is my favorite season - when fireflies, pretty and mysterious, burn in the rippling dark of night and glow like the full moon, their warmth and brilliance wrapping around me like an embrace.

When It Rains

Favorite Seasons

Make it rain, make it rain down low

Just make it rain, make it rain. - Song Lyrics

There are only two seasons in my home archipelago of Seven Thousand Islands: dry and wet. One never really knows which one it's going to be for the day or even for a segment of the day, but invariably either the sun shines or it rains.

After looking up at the bruised clouds gathering this late afternoon, I grin pleasedly and make a quick prediction, Rain.

I wait expectantly. Sure enough, a flash of light ensues. The sky gives out a roar, a familiar cry. The clouds are in labor. They are giving birth. I feel a small thrill as rain, like confetti, starts to drizzle silently outside. Ratiles leaves cradle its drops.  

A shower shortly starts to drum on the tin roof. I listen intently, patiently. It sounds like people clapping, as though the clouds have done something clever.

Then thunder ripples outside, more a grumble than a roar at being left behind by the lightning. The rain increases in intensity in answer to the thunder's command. The sky has opened, as if the anito gods were disconsolate.

Within minutes, large drops merge into a waterfall that needs no river as its source. Muddy water is pooling at the bottom of the adelfa bushes. My mouth gapes for a moment. It is no longer just raining. Water is pouring in sheets, beating down relentlessly, rattling the capiz shell panes of the window.

Dark clouds continue to spawn thin streaks of lightning, the latter's flashing fingers bridging the gap between heaven and earth. A moment or two passes, then the thunder comes again. The downpour has become a deluge as though from a gigantic reservoir that could never run dry.

Like a desert succulent, I drink up the beauty of the rain folding the city in its shroud. Thereafter sated and comfortably sleepy, I lie down to the perfect lullaby and insistent staccato of the raindrops.

Rain is my favorite season. I'm not telling it to stop. 

When Heavy Mists Hang

Favorite Seasons

Thick swirls of fog excite me. Thus, when a misty haze descends upon the city, I nix the taxi ride and opt to walk one-and-a-half miles on uneven terrain from the university to my boarding house.

Which is what I'm doing today.

The sky seems to be very low, encroaching upon the campus which is built on a mountain plateau. I peer at the bank of darkening clouds that has already formed over the Cordillera Central range.

Profuse and heavy water droplets hang suspended in the air as I head toward Session Road, the city's main downtown thoroughfare. Negotiating narrow and steep alleys, I veer down from Luneta Hill  toward the Baguio public market. The view looks so vast and wide from the road's so-called Upper Lane that the land appears endless.

Reaching its business hub, I see bazaars, Summit Bank, boutiques, and Victoria Bakery famous for its young coconut buko pie - the buildings somehow blending rather than clashing with the uncluttered scenery, becoming part of it. 

Past the commercial center, I quickly traverse onto the twisting lower byway. The grass is damp beneath my feet. Everything has turned thick and gray. Smoky swirls roll around me, giving a tiny peek of the road before shrouding it again.

Although the rhythms and nuances are as familiar as the lettering on the Magsaysay Avenue stop sign on the corner, what I see now is a shadow world of illusory shades. Igorot women with babies tied to their backs, wrapped in an Ifugao blanket, promenade as in a trance into town. On the sidewalk's backside, a stairway leads up to the Lady of Atonement Katedral church, veiled in thin light.

As I turn left toward General Lim street, I catch a glimpse of the Benget pine trees bordering historic Burnham Park. They seem to have lost all individuality, merging into a continuous blurry mass. An ethereal stillness has crept over the city, draping it in a specter of gauze, weightless and thin.

When heavy mists hang is my favorite season - when I can float, as in a dream, among spectral silhouettes of white.

Lord Of The Flies

Books Of My Life

The shore was fledged with palm trees. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings.

I lift my chin slightly, squinting at the opening pages of Golding's Lord of the Flies. A group of British boys, ages six to twelve - fair-haired Ralph, fat boy Piggy, Jack, Simon, and a handful of 'Littluns' - survive a plane crash and are stranded on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean. 

I'm already captivated by its premise. 

Whizzoh! I feel just as excited as Ralph, as he exclaims. Nobody knows where we are. We may be here a long time. While we're waiting we can have a good time on this island.

No grownups! I chirp. I read on, tapping my pencil doggedly.

Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk, and screwed up his eyes against the shimmering water. Behind was the darkness of the forest proper. Oh-ho, that's the ominous part.

They're all dead, says Piggy, his spark of hope fizzling with a silent hiss. An' this is an island. Nobody don't know we're here. Your dad don't know, nobody don't know-- We may stay here till we die.

I'm sorting through my memory, thinking that survival and ultimate rescue can't be the novel's leitmotif (that's literary-criticism-speak for 'theme'). It's too literal.

Sure enough, Prof, straddling the high wooden chair on which he likes to perch, confirms my thought in his assured, elegant way. The central concern of the novel is the conflict between the instinct to live by rules and act peacefully against the instinct to act violently to obtain supremacy over others and enforce one’s will.

Hah! I mutter, The price for your heart's desire is your heart. A life for a life. A world in balance. There are murmurs of agreement among the senior English majors in the 20th Century Literature class.

Wacco! Wizard! Smashing! So those initial exclamations from Ralph and the other boys who have emerged one by one from the bushes simply set the stage for what is to come – and it isn't going to be smashing good. They are simply actors who will play out roles already written for them.

As if reading my mind, Prof intones, his voice becoming brittle. The novel is an allegory. Its characters signify important ideas or themes. He has placed his elbows on the desk and is touching his fingers together. Ralph represents order, leadership, and civilization, he continues. 

I thought so.

When the conch shell is against his lips, he's in charge, Prof finishes his thought.

Clearly, the conch itself reiterates the same symbolism, I mutter, almost too quickly.

I like Piggy! A junior said, blushing, her voice out of the darkness from the back of the room. He is intelligent and despite his glasses he is the most rational boy in the group. For all his ludicrous body, he has brains.

That's right, Prof agrees. Piggy represents the scientific and intellectual aspects of civilization.

Catching on with the logic, her seatmate echoes in a husky voice, And his glasses represent the power of science and intellectual endeavor in society.

She must have read that from a literary criticism essay, I whisper it like a secret.

Again, Prof concurs. This symbolic significance is clear from the start of the novel, when the boys use the lenses from Piggy’s glasses to focus the sunlight and start a fire. 

And yet, despite their best efforts, that understandable and lawful world slips way. Unbridled savagery and the desire for power emerge in their midst. Jack, despite his declaration that they're not savages, leads a group of cloaked boys. Trying to keep his voice down, he hisses, The choir. They could be the Army – or hunters. 

So what could the imaginary beast that frightens all the boys stand for? Prof drawls, nonchalant. A grin spreads across his lined forehead as he waits for an answer. None is immediately forthcoming. After an uneasy silence, even from the English seniors, he volunteers the words with sudden ferocity and desperation. It's the primal instinct of savagery that exists within all human beings.

The boys’ behavior is what brings the beast into existence, so the more savagely the boys act, the more real the beast seems to become, Prof continues to speak quietly, seriously.

Now I understand why, by the end of the novel, the boys begin to treat the 'Beastie' as a totemic god, offering it the 'Lord of the Flies' -  the bloody, severed sow’s head that Jack impales on a stake in the forest glade. I see the 'observing' sophomore seated on the front row twist in his chair like a diabolical Chinese dragon. The whole class has become uneasy.

We look with narrowed eyes at Prof, as he continues in the same low voice. It becomes both a physical manifestation of the beast, a symbol of the power of evil, and a kind of Satan figure who evokes the beast within each human being.

His face darkened to an ominous hue, Prof hastily adds, Only Simon reaches the realization that they fear the beast because it exists within each of them. He grimly reads Simon's line from the book, Beastie. Maybe it's only us. 

What ensues is a battle between the two groups of boys. Piggy who has only gone to ask Jack for his glasses, meets his demise. A rock strikes him from chin to knee. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. 

As part of the quest to hunt and kill Ralph, Jack's gang sets fire to the forest. It is this fire of savagery that finally summons a ship to the island. 

When the naval officer asks Ralph and the group of bloodthirsty, savage children pursuing him to explain, Ralph begins to weep. He wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. The other boys begin to cry as well. The officer turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure. 

I can hardly hear Prof's closing commentary. His brows drawn together, he speaks of the instinct of civilization as good, and the instinct of savagery as evil.

My thoughts are in disarray. Feeling properly despondent, I rise from my seat and leave the classroom. 

The Plague

Books Of My Life

Monday has dawned gray and cold, matching my mood perfectly. Walking to my 20th Century Literature class, I feel like the sun has set and not risen for five days. I've just finished reading Camus' The Plague. This horrible morning after, what I need is refuge from my own thoughts and emotion.

When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.

This opening scene of the novel has been seared in my mind. The plague has just begun its onslaught on the French Algerian city of Oran. I step gingerly on the pavement, afraid that a big rodent might come toward me from the dark end of the street.

As I enter the classroom, I'm all ears, ready to hear that this haunting tale can't be all that literal. I want to be told that this story of unrelieved horror is a metaphor for something that can be overcome with human resilience. Forget the literal ganglias splitting open like an overripe fruit, men and rats dying on the street in a stench of corruption.

Prof begins reflectively, choosing his words. 'The Plague' is a representation of the philosophical notion of the absurd, a theory that Camus himself helped to define.

I lean forward with interest. I'm already loving it. Trust the European men of letters to come up with such erudite thoughts. 

The announcement of death is paramount in Camus' philosophy and his novels, Prof continues in quite a different tone of voice.

Yes, I do recognize that. An uneasy feeling settles in my stomach as I recall old Spaniard M. Michel, his face livid and grayish green, his limbs spread out by tumors, breathing his last in a sudden gasp. I hear it in his senile chuckle, looking at the fleeing vermin, They're coming out, they're coming out. Camus is proclaiming the death of many people in Oran where it has become evident that a real epidemic has set in.

Folding his arms, looking very satisfied, Prof explains, In existential absurdism, the world is senseless and indifferent to human suffering which is unceasing and often tortuous. 

Camus' view of life is depressing. He thinks that life has no meaning, and hence there is something deeply farcical about the human quest for such notion. My voice is feeble, as I muse. What is the point of living then if life is wildly illogical and can never have intention?

No answer comes to me. I feel deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I grimace at the thought of an almost empty town shrouded in darkness, palled in dust, seeming like a lost island of the damned.

Prof interrupts my languishing thoughts. Camus avers that individuals should embrace the preposterous condition of human existence while also defiantly continuing to explore and search for its essence. 

I get it. Indeed, in the novel, I recall that despite the discontent and hopeless days filled with dismay and darkness, the city residents have persisted in their long, heartrending struggle to survive - content to live if only for the day, feeling the minutes go by, leaden, heavy. Endless. Alone under the vast indifference of the sky. 

Prof echoes my thoughts, his voice now quiet and distant. The absurd hero doesn't despair. He clarifies, his lips slightly pursed like he's choosing his words carefully. Instead, he openly embraces the folly of his condition. 

I nod slowly. Of course. Dr. Rieux sums it up in his chronicle as the contagion lets up: To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Looking indifferently at my watch, I suck in a deep breath. I have to pick up my reserved copy of Lord of the Flies. All brisk and business-like, Prof notifies us, as if reading my thoughts. Next week, Golding.

I feel lightheaded. The perplexity that has settled around me like a heavy fog is lifting now. I look straight ahead to the library, stumbling slightly over my feet.