November, while it may have many faces, provides us with the security of certain constants. We can be sure that all our greenery would have been stripped from the deciduous trees and shrubs by the time the eleventh month is upon us. We can count on a dearth of wildlife from insects up to birds. And we can count on the sun dropping lower in the sky on each successive day.
Our fall walk has taken Norm, my dog, and I deep into the bush where we count our losses as fall erases the last vestiges of spring and summer. It is a sad time knowing that what was can never be again but next spring another world will appear, similar but not identical.
Rains of late August and September wash away the high temperatures that characterize our late summer and introduce 'fall' - a beautifully appropriate name for a season on the same scale as the name 'spring'-when the leaves of our deciduous trees fall off, an adaptation of survival for the coming winter. Indeed, the word deciduous is derived from Latin meaning cut or fall off.