Sometimes if you look inside and find nothing to write about it’s a good idea to look outside. The world, and nature in particular, will never fail to serve you up something so arresting you’ll be reaching for your pencil before you know it.

I have had feelings on certain autumn days that I’ve never forgotten. For example, October always moves me with its skies as blue as turquoise, its trees the colors of chrysanthemums, pinned like fat corsages to hills and gardens.

But then November comes and the corsages all fade. Bright tones of burnished bronze and fiery copper mute to hues of taupe and umber. Even the sky itself seems changed in November, its eye-hurting blue more veined with white somehow. It looks moister to us, streaked with what we know will be the clouds of winter, snow-seeded and gathering; gathering.

October is all parade music: The Tuba’s big loud oomph. The rattle of snare drums. Great big brass instruments brassily played.

November by contrast is chamber music, played in a minor key. It is string and reed instrument, rather than brass and percussion. It is the oboe’s measured sob, the sustained and tremulous sigh of violins. In its small span of days, it is a season unto itself. And in this month you see Earth as she really is, undressed of flounce and ruffle.

Close your eyes and let it be November now in your mind’s eye. Walk outdoors and subtract the leaves and flowers, the heavy hanging globes of fruit and vegetable, for they are gone. And yet there is beauty all around you, the good bones beneath the skin: earth’s architecture, in all its grace and proportion.

The wind picks up, come November. It scours and polishes; works a practiced hand in the corners of all creation; lifts the sweepings of gardens and makes them spin in dizzy circles.

Then things feel tidied; and animated with a freshened vigor. The squirrels feel it. They draw quick furry arcs as they frisk and caper. The children surely feel it. Sensitive creatures that they are, they sniff the wind to sense which way it is blowing.

Two six-year-olds rang my doorbell one November day and asked to rake our leaves, purely for the fun that was in it. They did rake them, in mounds too wide and scattered to possibly pick up; rang the bell again and pronounced the job done. Gravely, we gave them each a dollar.

Later that day I drove in my car and saw a line of third-graders assembled by a forest for what was clearly a field trip. A small nametag-wearing contingent of parents lingered at the edges, stiff with cold, mittened hands thrust deep in their pockets.

The kids themselves didn’t notice the chill. Lined up by twos, they jostled and hip-checked as the teacher explained in a loud outdoor voice. At last they started moving into the woods. “We’re walking!” she shouted after them, but she spoke only for herself. The rest of them were jumping, hopping, dancing; I didn’t spot a single walker …

Then toward around 4pm I went to a town pond and saw an old man sleeping in his car, his mouth open like a baby bird’s. Near him, on an oak bench, a bundled person in a knit cap winged bread crusts at some ducks. A lone goose bobbed like a cork on the water, whose surface brisk winds had lifted into cowlicks.

I knew that at some point soon this pond would be frozen. I realized that the deep indigo of early evening was just settling on commuters waiting at bus stops. I envisioned many deliverymen hurriedly stitching together shops and houses in their rounds in and out of buildings.

I knew that an hour on, most would be home, lighting lamps by sofas and beds; knew too that a month on, holiday lights would festoon these streets and roadways; knew that two months on, the snow would have spread her linen cloth on every bush and hillside.

But this day was still an autumn day, with a morning that flashed like amethyst or topaz, with a noontime that glowed soft as the milky opal; and setting down a few descriptions of it helped me both to relish it and inhabit it fully.

• Now you try writing about the season you’re in right now.

• You’ll need to go outside and feel the air on your face. It’s fine to sit in your car because you’re protected in it. Go someplace in your car where no one will question you, some park or playground or pondside place, a place where there are other people in cars just looking out at the day. Their looking out will help you direct your gaze out.

• Stretch your legs and settle in. Turn off the radio and listen to the wind.

• Notice any birds that come by and watch how they interact with the people.

• Watch the people and see how this day affects them. They are here to see it too. To really see any one day is to feel grateful for it and so to journal is to offer prayers of thanksgiving in a way.

Ravenscroft Press ©Copyright 2007 Terry Marotta, All Rights Reserved.