The frost has arrived, and my garden has been closing up shop for the year. Taking down my hammock and bringing in my table and chairs is like the shutting up of one of the loveliest rooms in my farmhouse. I’ll have to wait for the long golden days of next spring and summer to enjoy reading while swinging beneath the leaves again.
One of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Goudge, captures this moment of the year so beautifully in her book A City of Bells:
Everywhere there seemed a suggestion of fires burning, orange and red and gold. In the gardens of the Close were scarlet dahlias and yellow chrysanthemums, while the trees on the Tor and the elms on the Cathedral Green were pure gold.
In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity were there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them.
The hills outside my farmhouse have been fading in a last burst of glory, but for me, spring hasn’t felt so very far away. I’ve spent the past few months writing and illustrating the transformation, not of fall to winter, but of winter to spring. The slow advent of daffodils and the delicate lace of new leaves is the backdrop for the third book in my Cymbeline series, which just came out on Amazon as an ebook and a paperback.
Each of the installments in my kitten series covers not one singular season but instead a seasonal shift - summer to fall, fall to winter, now winter to spring - and spring to summer still to come! God dropped my tiny kitten in her tree hollow just as the gold of August was yielding to the gold of September, and the slow and steady progress of the seasons has been such a fruitful foil to the slow and steady progress of her kittenhood, both in real life and in the books.
There’s something so magical about the point when the year stands poised between its recurring patterns, when the page turns between warmth and chill, between fullness and lack, between life and death - and then, eventually, back to life again. Every fall, I marvel not just at the beauty of the leaves as they float in the breeze like butterflies but also at their wisdom at knowing when to let go, at the way the trees so freely and gracefully gift their largesse to the wind and to the world, knowing it will return when the time is right. Taking down my hammock makes me a little melancholy, and the golden leaves are so beautiful, I wish I could ask them to stay a moment longer - but I don’t think it bothers the trees at all to shake off the dross of the past year.
There’s another passage from A City of Bells, this time about the arrival of spring, that illustrates this idea and always stand out in my memory:
It was that moment of spring when the world is pink and blue in the distance and yellow and white close at hand. Blue hills were piled against the sky in shaped more lovely than a man can build and the woods that lay at their feet or crept up their sides had all flushed rosily at the kiss of the spring…it was a still, warm day after rain, and delicious smells came to Jocelyn through the window, the smell of the gorse and the wallflowers in the cottage gardens, the smell of wood smoke and freshly turned earth and rain-washed grass and fresh beginnings. A pity to be tired of life in such a world, thought Jocelyn. If the old earth could wash herself and begin again so often and so humbly, why could not a man do the same?”
Like the old earth, cats are extraordinarily wise - and spend many hours washing themselves anew. 😉 They live by a native percipience of the rhythms God has embedded in the natural world.1 My apex predator has always possessed absolute faith in her instincts, even as she was still refining and honing her skills as a growing kitten, and her straightforward confidence is endlessly inspiring. As anyone privileged to be a cat caretaker can tell you, cats don’t second guess themselves. They know what they want, and they know how to get it. They can communicate without having to resort to words.
Watching Cymbeline savor the fresh though frigid air on the jungle house porch, Emma suppressed an ignoble wish that the little cat would be satisfied with an indoor life. There were few things as cozy as the snow falling outside and a lazy cat rolling on the rug inside, but the young lady couldn’t forget the supreme satisfaction that the tiny kitten in the tree hollow had taken in her outdoor surroundings.
As adorable as Cymbeline appeared when she was snug in some self-selected nap spot in the farmhouse, the little cat never looked more fully alive and fulfilled than when she was outside under the open sky. She would sit happily on the icy concrete of the porch, her paws tucked carefully and cozily under her tail to keep warm, while she eagerly observed the landscape beyond the wire fence.
So persistently was Cymbeline’s preference expressed (in the mysterious, unspoken, hypnotic language through which cats communicate with their caretakers), that Emma was sometimes tempted to apologize for keeping Cymbeline indoors, safe and sound and warm and fed, through the winter.
“Soon you can wander further Cymbeline,” Emma promised the little cat. “The vet said that you could go outside on your own when you turned six months old, but see how cold it is! We’ll wait until the sun gets warmer. Once the daffodils arrive, then you can wander as you please.”
Cymbeline conceded that it was rather too cold to be out wandering lonely as a cloud. Snow covered the hills around the farmhouse and draped itself over the woods behind the jungle house. The snowdrops shivered in the wind, and the little yellow aconite buds stayed resolutely shut. Everywhere the trees stood silently, waiting patiently for the sap to rise and their leaves to return.
But Cymbeline was not worried or impatient. Like the trees, she knew that the winter would pass.
Felines and forests can be very edifying and elevating guides as to how to patiently wait for life’s winters to pass, and I have loved exploring this theme in a whimsical way the books. If you have read all the way to the end of this post and are enjoying it, then you really have no excuse not to go and get a copy of your own of the new book. 😊 It should make a relaxing read to curl up with on a winter evening, or, if you’re starting your Christmas shopping, a lovely gift for a “Big Cat” of any age.
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for cats, changing seasons, and all you lovely readers. Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday weekend!
One of my favorite passages in the new book that follows this vein is about cats and what humans call, unimaginatively, the electromagnetic grid - I call it something else in the book, but you’ll have to go get a copy to find out what!
On Cats 🐈 & Changing Seasons 🍂