Enjoying the end of fall

Seasons on the turn, a despicable sentence from the governor, and flower of the week

Brandon Taylor: “Maybe I should just shut up and enjoy the leaves. Because the fact is I never feel more myself than in the fall. I love the long night. The cold evening. The sunset in fall is incomparably beautiful, all that metallic blue and burnished orange.”

If my defense of fall’s shortening days made your blood boil, definitely don’t read Brandon Taylor’s gorgeous short essay about autumn, memory, discriminating between nostalgia and manufactured experiences, apple picking, and woodsmoke. You will not have a good time if that is the case.

I suppose it’s winter by some measures now. I don’t set much stock in the solstice markers for the seasons, astronomical though they may be, and prefer to go by sniffing the air and having a look around. (June 19 = spring? June 20 = summer? Nonsense.) The air and the trees are pretty wintery right now. Around here, we have a nor’easter on the way this weekend. But the oak trees and some others still have plenty of leaves. It’s fall for a little while longer, so enjoy it or hide from it next to a space heater, after your own inclinations. I do both, at different times.

Here are a couple photos from earlier this fall:

I love little paths through neighborhoods that lead to small parks or common grounds.

Salt marsh fall color on Great Island near Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

The most despicable sentence I’ve read in a while

In announcing current plants for distributing COVID vaccines, Mass. governor Charlie Baker said that the early shipments of vaccines would go to healthcare workers, people over 65, people with high-risk health conditions and essential workers. That’s as it should be. We have to prioritize. Then he said this:

"It would probably be Q2 before just Joe Q or Jane Q Citizen would have access to a vaccine.”

The statement exposes what an ordinary person is to a governor. He’s not talking to people like you and I but talking about us and what businesses can expect about our economic behavior. His audience is business leaders making plans for 2021 (“Q2”) and that such people can’t expect Joe Q and Jane Q Citizen to be freely spending money and working in their pre-pandemic ways in Q1.

If what you’re trying to say is that we, most people, should wait so that those most at risk can get the vaccine first, then say that. That’s fine. Instead of “Joe Q or Jane Q Citizen,” he could have said most people, people not at the highest risk, the majority of people. The phrase has all the charm of saying “random nobodies.” And then there’s the pointlessly financialized word choice of “Q2.” He could have said after April, between April and June, later in the spring. All those things mean the same thing. Instead, he said the quiet part loud: the vaccine is a means to saving the economy, a booster for shareholder value. A politician that still only thinks in terms of “It’s the economy, stupid” in the middle of the biggest pandemic in modern history. Who continues to believe, amid surging cases, that putting more restrictions on going to restaurants and stores is the last thing we want to do.

In Sim Cities, the computer game where you’re the god-mayor of an indefinitely growing city (you can zone areas and institute ordinances as well as spawn tornadoes), the people who live in your city are called Sims. Goods and services are paid for in Simoleons. Your advisors tell you that the Sims want more of this and less of that. The teacher Sims are on strike, the business leader Sims want lower taxes. You move slider bars around and your city changes. You throw aliens and earthquakes at the hapless Sims and watch them rebuild.

Of course, it’s just a game. No living human politician would think of his constituents as Sims, bits and bytes circuiting around a make-believe city to generate Simoleons for his budget.

Joe Q and Jane Q Citizen. Q2.

The bar for centrist politicians like Baker is on the floor, thanks to the extremism of Bush, the Tea Party, and Trump. I’m pretty tired of people talking up Massachusetts’ progressivism when we have a Republican governor that waved away weeks of accelerating COVID spread in order to keep businesses open, meanwhile blaming ordinary people for their behavior rather than changing policies.

I guess why I’m angry is that this all could have been different. People that died could still be alive today. But lives can still be spared: we need to stop evictions and greater restrictions on in-person businesses. Give Charlie a call: (617) 725-4005

Flower of the week: The last knapweed of the year

Anyway, flowers. This picture was taken three weeks ago on Cape Cod’s Great Island (we were there for a little birthday hike), but it’s not inaccurate in its essence now—there are still occasional flowers here and there, as bizarre as it sounds. Some weeds just don’t know when they’re beaten, I guess. I can’t guarantee it was truly the last knapweed of the year, period, but it’s the last one I’ve seen.

Knapweed (Centaurea) are introduced species in Massachusetts, and they don’t play nice with other herbaceous plants, outcompeting them for nutrients and water in part because of their devilishly long taproots. They arrived along with alfalfa seeds intended for crop fields and spread far before anything could be done to stop them, specializing in disturbed soils. However, their kryptonite seems to be grass. A good tuft of little bluestem or some other tough grass can turn the tide against knapweed.

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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.