The Daily: 23 September 2023

Happy Mabon?

Is it possible to unselfconsciously use the Wiccan-derived names for the quarter days? Because I can’t seem to get there. For the third quarter day of the year, they chose a rather obscure deity as their name for the holiday. I couldn’t say what the Welsh Mabon, or Maponos, the perpetually young Son of the Great Mother, has to do with the middle of the harvest season. Perhaps if you squint in just the right way, Mabon’s characteristics could lean toward equating the young god with Kore, Demeter’s daughter, and so he could be a grain god on his annual autumn return to the Otherworld. But that interpretation is a stretch. It would be one thing if the holiday had been traditionally named Mabon and anthropology then had to come up with an explanation for this strange appellation. Then you might turn to grain gods (though, to paraphrase House, it’s never grain gods…). But to apply tortured grain god logic to a choice made in the mid 20th century probably indicates that there was no logic — nor grain gods — in the choice. In any case, I feel sort of squiffy about saying Happy Mabon, when what I mean is Happy Harvest Home. That goes double for Ostara (not a thing) and Litha (a word taken from Tolkien). The only quarter day name I use is Yule — because that is, in fact, a traditional name for the fourth quarter day in the year, the winter solstice.

To be honest, I don’t always use the NeoPagan names for the cross-quarter days either. I’m not convinced those days were ever called by their Celt-esque names. Take Samhain, for example. In the Romano-Gaulic Coligny Calendar, there was a month named Samonios, which means something like “month of summer”, but that moon cycle began in mid to late May and stretched into June — and there’s no reason to assume that this early summer month was called Samonios anywhere else in the Celtic world nor at any time period other than late Roman Gaul. So the name for the late autumn holiday doesn’t seem to derive from Samonios.

Now, there was a sacred time that in Irish myths that was called Samhaine, end of summer, or in Welsh, Calan Gaeaff, beginning of winter, but there is scant evidence that this corresponded to the last day of October. For that matter, October, as such, was not a recognized time period among the insular Celtic tribes nor in the Coligny Calendar. There might have been a Samhaine, but it wasn’t necessarily Halloween, nor does the mythic Samhaine have much thematically in common with the modern celebration. So, for me, that really fun time from October 31 (or from October 1, for some of us) through somewhere around Bonfire Night on November 5th is not Samhaine; it’s Halloween — with special dispensation for All Saints and Día de los Muertos.

But whatever you call it, today is the autumnal equinox, the day the sun passes the ecliptic on its apparent trip south. In my part of the world, this is not quite the first day of less than twelve hours of daylight; day and night are not of equal length, yet. It’s also not the day that the sun rises and sets directly east and west on the horizon. It is merely the day that the noontide sun has crossed an imaginary line in the sky into the southern hemisphere. However, it is a Saturday, and here in New England there are fall festivals left, right and center, with food and newly tapped cider, music and craft fairs and parades, and, my favorite, the pumpkin chucking contest. There is a town in New Hampshire that employs a full-sized trebuchet to toss pie pumpkins into the town pond. There are no prizes for this “contest”, but the pumpkins that fly far out into the water or make an enormous splash never fail to elicit crowd cheers — and the lines to take a turn at pumpkin hurling on a giant siege weapon wrap around an entire block.

My town does not have a trebuchet. (I may have to do something about this.) But, I suppose, we also don’t have a large town pond to absorb smashed pumpkins. (Maybe only a little trebuchet, then.) We do have a parade and food trucks and, after the summer we’ve had, there’s an unusually strong will to let loose and party. It is loud today, despite the continuous dampening rain. But it’s a jumpy sort of loud, maybe because of the continuous dampening rain. It feels like we are forcing ourselves to be happy, dammit… (I think a pumpkin-chucking trebuchet would help foster a more festive mood, no matter the rain.) 

The local paper on Thursday ran three headlines on the front page. Two led into articles on the budgetary woes of central Vermont. The flood was expensive and unforeseen. We did not vote in emergency funds at quite this scale, and so our town managers are scrambling to cover costs. Or not, as the case may be. The third front page article was on hay shortages, the result of both flooding and the erratic spring weather. In a survey of regional farmers conducted by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, 40% reported a damaging loss of animal feed. Flooding of hay fields will continue to hurt farmers and their livestock for the rest of the winter. Like the town emergency spending, it is unclear how these shortfalls are going to be recuperated. Vermont community spirit is certainly helping to meet needs, but there is only so much that can be done when there just isn’t enough money — or hay.

Still, spirits are at least bright on the surface around here. It is the middle of fall, the reason people choose to live in New England. Fall is a fetish in this part of the world, for obvious reasons. New England has absolutely arresting fall foliage. The combination of sunshine yellow birches and maples that range from outrageous orange to fire engine red against a background of deep green pines and nearly black firs is unmatched – even in years like this one when the colors are tempered by brown and rust. However, this year, the leaves are only now starting to show color. So if you’re planning a leaf peeping trip, the mountains might look like flames in a week or two.

(For those of you who are driving all up and down the state this weekend, clogging up the highways with your citified Range Rovers and enormous tour buses… now is not that time… please, go home until further notice.) 

Another reason to especially love fall is that New England’s harvest is heavily skewed to the autumn fruits and veg. We have brief encounters with tomatoes and cucumbers. Melons are a rare treat. But summer is only the appetizer on the full flow of fall foods. Beans and peas tend to be more prolific in the fall. Greens of all kinds prefer the cool weather, but more importantly there is less predation from insects and rodents, heading into October. It is cold enough at night now that most of the bugs are sluggish, and the main leaf-eating rodents are groundhogs who bed down in their winter burrows around Michaelmas. But the bulk of the harvest comes from the long season squashes, potatoes, and the autumn apples and pears – which are also a rainbow of warm autumnal color — and all that is ripe right now!

So we love fall. This is a season of gorgeous opulence. But even in a good year, there is a nervous edge to New England autumn celebrations, a frenetic note jangling underneath the joy — a season of squirrels on caffeine — because fall leads into winter, and this means something in this part of the world. For the next five or six months, we can expect deadly cold, deep snow, and a prodigious number of ways to be cut off from all contact with the world. Power outages, and the resultant loss in communications, happen regularly. Deliveries of food to markets or heating fuel to homes and businesses can be interrupted for days. Travel to work or to buy necessities becomes impossible at least several times a month. In New England, the autumn harvest season precedes months of real dearth.

And today we are halfway through fall.

Even in this modern age, in New England, fall is the season of frantic stockpiling. Maybe I should say despite this modern age, as many aspects of our culture put us at a disadvantage when it comes to muddling through disaster. When supply lines and transport distances were shorter, winter was a less fragile time. Today, many of us don’t have space to store what we need, even if we could procure it locally. In a culture where heat and water are reliant on a functioning electrical grid and food comes from half a world away, even a mild winter storm wreaks havoc.

In Vermont, we have too much experience with winter’s disruption to trust that the modern age will keep the heat on and the food on the table. Those that live by more durable life-ways are rushing to put by enough before winter ends all activity. This weekend, two of my coworkers are taking delivery on the winter’s supply of wood pellets for the heating stove — shipments of half a dozen pallets of bagged pellets that need to be stacked where they will be accessible and dry even in a blizzard. There are regular pantry discussions and anxious comparisons, as people try to reassure themselves that there will be food despite the inevitable isolation. This year, the usual winterizing repair work on siding, windows and roofs is amplified by the extra demands of flood damage remediation. Public works is also working full tilt to fix roads and bridges and drainage systems before construction becomes impossible and winter, once again, renders the roads impassable. Yes, Vermonters are a little wild-eyed right now, worrying away at the uncertainty of sufficiency after this disastrous summer. In our minds is a constant apprehensive refrain: Will it be enough?… And the terrifying corollary: What happens if it isn’t?

It’s all well and good to take each day as it comes and not worry about tomorrow if you can reasonably expect that tomorrow is not a cause for concern. But all such philosophy falls apart in a Vermont winter. The grasshopper will die. The ants might make it… if they’ve taken advantage of every last scrap of autumnal abundance. And if there isn’t a flood that has substantially diminished that abundance. Vermonters are trying to convince themselves that they’ve been diligent ants despite the summer weather. We are celebrating loudly, perhaps hoping thereby to propitiate the grain gods and their vengeful mothers. But as we cheer the parades and chuck the pumpkins and down cider by the bucketful, there’s that needling unease. Will it be enough? And what happens when it isn’t?

Today, to celebrate the harvest and thumb my nose at the approaching winter, I am putting the garlic and onions in the cellar and spreading the potatoes out to cure. The apples are going into bins and pints of tomato sauce are going into the freezer. I have some perennial herbs and native flowers to work into the vacant spaces that filled with weeds over the summer — so that maybe there will be fewer weeds next summer. I’ll go to the farmer’s market to buy a few more winter squashes since my own squash patch never did recover from groundhog devastation. And I’ll be making bread and hummus and green chile potato-leek soup. It is not quite cold enough to need to close the storm windows or turn on the furnace yet, but sometime in the next few days I’ll probably put away the window air conditioner and the fans. Last night, I folded up the backyard lounge chair — that I barely got to sit in over this soggy summer — and put it in the attic. And I planted mums in the pots on the front porch. 

Today, there is abundance. Most of the flood damage here on my bit of the world is cleaned up and fixed. It is raining today, but it’s not snow. Not yet. The trees are only starting to turn colors. There is still time before winter. Time to put by a bit more of the autumn harvest. Time to plant over-wintering veg for a spring harvest. Time to celebrate the Harvest Home. 

And maybe time to build a pumpkin-chucking trebuchet…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023