Slowly, Slowly, October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the wall.

~Robert Frost

Every now and then you come across a poem that gives you a framework by which you process a certain time in your life. During my trip to Armenia over the summer, Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" provided that framework. Now I've moved on to this poem by Frost.

It's no wonder, really, that this poem has captivated me so. It captures that feeling you get when you realize that, although you are standing very still, time is sweeping by like the wind that pulls the autumn leaves from the trees. Try as you'd like, you can't catch it, and its swiftness--while exhilarating--is excruciating. Adding to the allure of this poem is the delicious, elusive sense of what Lewis called "the Idea of Autumn." Fall is my favorite season: I love the cool snap in the air, the sharp blue sky, the vibrant colors, and the smell of bonfires that hangs in the air on certain days. I love the sense that the approach of the holidays is quickening. Somehow, though fall is typically thought of as an end, it always carries the brisk excitement of a beginning. So many good things have happened, for me, in October. Don't get me wrong, a lot of yucky things have happened in October too, but overwhelmingly my associations with it are good.

This October, for instance, has been fantastic. I'm so glad I came to England in the fall, because my seasonal exuberance has only compounded with my love of being over here. Last week I got back from five days in Scotland, which was one ridiculously fun adventure (that you will have to ask me about if you want to hear the story, because it would take entirely too long to do the trip justice here). Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, we're going to take a spooky tour of Oxford Castle--which is literally a five-minute walk from our houses--and sometime this weekend we'll be carving pumpkins, which I bought today at the Covered Market. I'm feeling very festive.

But I'm also feeling very torn. November starts on Tuesday, and my last day of term is December third. Two months didn't seem so long; one month seems even less. It's not that I feel as though time has been going especially quickly. Every day has been full to bursting, one way or another; I don't think I've had a single day where the time has gone quickly for the simple reason that I wasted it. (Hence my infrequent blog postings: I've been too busy.) It's just that I'm coming to realize what all those adults I didn't want to believe said I would realize: that we don't have nearly as much time as we thought we did when we were children. Two months seems like a short time because it is.

I'm not ready to say goodbye to the fall-ripe leaves, the crows, or grapes clustered on the wall. I'm not ready to say goodbye to all of this. Luckily, I don't have to just yet. I still have time, though from where I'm sitting it doesn't look like much. And I hesitate to say that I wish I had more time, because I now have one or two more reasons to want to get home quickly than I did when I first arrived.

Instead, I ask like Frost for October--and November, and December--to beguile me. Make it seem slow, since nothing anyone can do can make time pass at a different pace. Let me make the most of it: let me go where I haven't, learn what I don't yet know, and strike my roots as deep as I can before I have to pull them out.

"Slow, slow! For the grapes' sake, if they were all,
...For the grapes' sake along the wall."

"Hey, Remember That Time When Brittani Threw an Apple at a Cat?"

Just a few minutes ago I charged out of Kalie's room, where I'd been working on my essay for the better part of three hours, in a blind and raging fury. Wearing my pajamas and thick wool socks--an outfit that somehow downplayed the intimidation I was hoping to inspire--I stormed into the kitchen and began to scour the items on the countertop in search of a suitable projectile. At the sound of me stomping down the stairs, Stephen emerged from his room and followed me into the kitchen. Still blazing with hostility, I met his confused and questioning look with the only thing I could articulate in the state I had achieved:

"I'm going to kill that cat."

Now, fellow travelers, I should probably explain that I'm not typically the kind of person who likes to do cruel things to animals. I love animals so much it's ridiculous, and it both amuses and exasperates my friends who have to put up with me wanting to pet every dog I pass. Though I'm typically not a cat person, I don't mind them unless they go out of their way to be mean. We have a cat here that will sit outside and mew sweetly until you come out to stroke her, at which point she will turn into a purring machine until she is satisfied with the attention. I am a fan of this cat.

However, there is another cat. And maybe it isn't mean, but we have come to despise it with every ounce of animosity we can muster. This cat does not cutely beg attention like the cat Debbie christened Juliet last year. Oh no. It sits outside and yowls, horribly, like it's either having a cat-gasm or dying. It's like a banshee, or a feline harbinger of despair and sleeplessness, since its favorite time to go caterwauling is when it's dark outside. I described it to my friend Holly as "Satan, with fur."

We've put up with its wailing for the most part, but you have to understand, fellow travelers, that it has been a stressful few days. The deadline of our first paper is upon us, and we're all (with the exception of the few who finished it early, because they're overachievers) a bit stressed out. I'm actually pretty proud of how productive I've been, although I still feel overwhelmed. Combined with a shortage of sleep, a bout of homesickness, and a stomach that had been threatening to mutiny against me all day, I was at the breaking point. And then the cat started up.

I'm not the most pleasant person to be around when I'm stressed. I recognize this. And I'm coming to realize that I'm probably going to be stressed quite a bit when I'm here, just because now that our tutorials are starting we are about to really hit the books. But still, that's what we're here for: the challenge, the academia, the experience. We're here to learn, and we're here to work. Luckily this work sometimes entails choosing leisure time over productivity; at least, this is what I choose to believe Mark Twain meant when he said you should never let your learning get in the way of your education. Kalie and I already missed a lecture we wanted to attend because we were working on our papers instead, but we don't intend to let it happen again. And in two weeks, we're going to Scotland, where the challenge really is going to be not falling behind in our schoolwork while refusing to sacrifice the experience of travel. It's a balance: a balance that I'm not good at, a balance that I'm looking forward to practicing. I can deal with stress as long as I have something fun to offset it.

However, I can't deal with stress and that cat.

Let's return to the narrative at hand. To set up the scene, I am standing in the kitchen in my pajamas, an absurd contrast to the absolutely murderous expression on my face, and I'm grabbing for what seems to me the most logical choice of a hurl-able weapon: a Fuji apple I bought at the market and never ate. With Stephen watching me, still looking bewildered (but kind of excited, because he hates the cat too), I charge out the door and into the night.

The cat goes silent as soon as the door bangs open, but I spot it staring at me just beyond our gate. Maybe it can tell that I have absolutely no good intentions, because it starts running just as I take aim and throw the apple like a softball.

My aim has always been notoriously bad, but I actually came pretty close to hitting it. Not close enough to actually hurt the cat--which, now that I'm in a calmer state of mind, I realize would have been a very bad thing that would have made me feel horrible later--but close enough for me to feel satisfied with the throw and to make the cat bolt in terror, probably too scarred to look at an apple the same way ever again. The apple itself bounced over the cobbles, flinging juicy shrapnel over the road in its wake.

The cat paused under a streetlight to stare at me with a kind of indignant horror as I went to retrieve my weapon. I was tempted to try again, but the cat saw me looking at it and scarpered. Stephen was staring at me as I walked stiffly back to our house, torn between triumphant in that I had shut the cat up or highly embarrassed at my behavior. With as much nonchalant dignity as I could muster (which was not a lot, let me tell you), I informed him that "I didn't hit it."

Kalie's voice rang out delightedly through the open upstairs window: "Did you really throw something at the cat?!"

My composure broke. Standing there in the dark, in my pajamas, clutching a ruined apple under the incredulous gaze of one of my housemates while the other cracked up in the room above us, I started laughing. Because sometimes, when you're stressed and everything seems awful and you don't really know what to do about it, that's all you really can do.

We're all back in Kalie's room now, pounding out the pages for these essays. We've brightened up a little bit after the hilarity of the night's oddest incident and after a nice cup of tea. The apple has been enshrined in the refrigerator, in all its mangled glory, until its services are required again.

This is probably going to be the first of many anecdotes about the crazy, sometimes irrational things that my friends and I do when we hit the height of our stress levels. And you know what? That's okay. Because you've got to cope somehow, and sometimes the only way to do it is to throw apples at cats.

Just don't tell PETA.