Pondering the meaning of mild days in autumn

What a curious contradiction, to be making wreaths while the dianthus is still blooming pink and the feverfew boasts its white-rayed flowers.

“We’re gonna pay,” said a woman at the grocery store on yet another balmy day this last week of November.

Perhaps we will, but there are no complaints around this part of Down East Maine that Old Man Winter hasn’t breathed down our necks yet. Our fishermen, hauling from dawn till dark, haven’t lost many days due to bad weather. Other neighbors are taking full advantage of the mild weather by stringing decorative icicle lights from eaves, raking the last layer of maple leaves, cleaning gutters, shingling the side of the house, patching roofs and accomplishing all manner of outside work normally curtailed by now.

Just the other morning – with not a puff of breeze along the coast – several men used a lift to raise a new steeple for their church. Builders continued on the new Masonic Hall. Grandmothers strolled babies, and folks on ladders draped Christmas lights around spruce and fir trees.

Every day, we figure, is one less in the long winter ahead; another day’s reprieve before the snow and ice and blasts of arctic air drive us inside for hibernation.

Though welcome, the unseasonably warm November has seemed strange and almost lends credence to the foreboding expressed by the store clerk. She remembers the weather proverb: Flowers in bloom late in autumn indicate a bad winter.

The squirrels and chipmunks must know something; they’re scurrying around out back, dragging twigs and spruce cones for nests under the deck. Robins, usually gone by now, have feasted for days on berries deep inside the burning bush, and a cow moose grazed near the tree line as though it were midsummer.

Strange indeed to see a man in shirtsleeves riding his bicycle through town this week and boys in sweat shirts skipping rocks at the shore as they did in July. We well remember snow-covered roads by late November and duck hunting one Thanksgiving Day when ice already coated the cove and crunched under our boots in the frozen bog.

But this autumn there hasn’t been enough frost on the pumpkin to notice, and grass grows green on lawns throughout town. Buds have formed on the forsythia, and the white phlox is ready to bloom once again.

What all this means is anyone’s guess. Even in old Bedfordshire:

“Well, Duncombe, how will be the weather?”

“Sir, it looks cloudy altogether,

“And coming across our Houghton Green,

I stopped and talked with old Frank Beane.

“While we stood there, sir, old Jan Swain

Went by and said he knowed ‘twould rain;

“The next that came was Master Hunt,

And he declared he knew it wouldn’t.

“And then I met with Farmer Blow,

He plainly said he didn’t know,

“So, sir, when doctors disagree,

Who’s to decide it, you or me?”