This wonderful video of Nat King Cole singing Autumn Leaves was one of the final prompts for 30 Poems in November, last week. This is one of my favorite old jazz standards, though it’s something of an ear worm. For days afterwards the song stayed in my head, especially after I found and played not just one, but two videos that adopted Autumn Leaves to different classical styles. Of course, that made me want to rush to the piano and see what I could do with Autumn Leaves, which was still an impossibility with my broken clavicle.

But yesterday the orthopedist gave me the green light to start playing again (as long as I “let pain be my guide”–a loaded statement if there ever was one.) To make sure I didn’t overdo it, I set my timer for ten minutes and made sure to keep the left hand bass-line simple–not to play it like Rachmaninoff, or even like Beethoven. There was still a lot to explore in improvising, far more than my ear dared do. I stuck with the basics, not like the walk we took today in the woods, where map-less, we ended up on a different part of the road about half a mile from the car–a fairly typical experience when the unmarked trail is just too seductive not to follow it. I’d like to do more improvisations without a map and not be so worried about where I might end up.

Autumn is brilliant in New England in October–pure eye candy, as you can see in this picture. But in November, and often in early December, as well, the prevailing theme is brown. Chilly and cold.

Yet there’s a subtle beauty to the season, we just have to take a little more time to find it. Poem #29  touched on the varying shades of November: ochre, rust, mauve, sienna, even if at times the month feels like treading shadows. Today, a foggy rain is covering the farm. The autumn leaves, all raked up, are in the shed, eventually to be mixed into the compost to nurture spring’s new growth.

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