In the Time of The Juncos

Autumn comes in on the coattails of a storm, a cool wind chasing clouds. Humidity breaks, there’s a colder edge to mornings and evenings. Yellow and red leaves sprout in clusters, and a gradual panorama of color sweeps across the horizon of trees.

It’s a time of contrasts and colors, red set against green, yellow leaves, blue sky. Around here it’s a time of storms as well. One day it’s warm air with a thunderstorm, the next bitter cold and drizzling rain. The wind comes in and doesn’t stop for days, knocking down the leaves as quick as they change color.

The original inhabitants of this area did not use a calendar as such, but they did name moons. I don’t know all the names, but if I were following their lead, I would name this October moon for the dark-eyed juncos that start to arrive in great flocks. Dark-eyed juncos are grayish birds this time of year, having traded their flashier summer feathers for a muted winter look. They invade the grassy fields around town, flashing white tail feathers as they dart and hover, picking food off the ground.

You see them most often at the side of the road, a startled flock sent into flight by the approaching rush of your car. A spray of white tail feathers darting away into the cover of trees.

For several weeks a flock of 30 or 40 juncos inhabits the small stretch of grass in front of the large windows where I sit in the mornings, drinking coffee, watching the sunrise.

In the past we’ve followed the juncos south to where their migration stops, around North Carolina in the east. This year autumn rolled around and we had no way to leave. The school bus sits, still unfinished. The Travco sits, needing brakes, and a new exhaust manifold (among other things). There are only so many hours in the day, so many days in the summer.

This summer the focus was making the somewhat ramshackle house we bought, less ramshackle. That’s a slow process, though I did get a new room added for my daughter.

I knocked down walls, moved doors, re-routed wires, built walls and added doors. I even learned how to hang drywall and have it look halfway decent (thanks VancouverCarpenter). All of which was fun — I like building things — but none of which gave us a vehicle to travel in this fall.

And even that small room is not done. There is still trim and molding to add, a ceiling fan to hang. And that’s just one room. There are whole other rooms to finish. It’s a big project, stretching many years into the future, and nowhere in the process will we end up with a vehicle to travel in. That will take a separate effort, which will require carving out time to do it.

I wanted to be here, with the juncos. Sitting in the dunes, digging my toes in warm sand:

Instead I sit by the big windows in the morning, drinking my coffee, sketching plans, watching the juncos in the grass. Everyday there are fewer until one day I get up and there are none, just the wind sweeping through the empty trees, the rattle of dry leaves dragging across the ground.