This November Day

A reflection.

November’s light and shadow in our backyard.

November has always felt like one of the unheralded months to me. It’s wedged between the sugar-high of Halloween and the great cooking marathon of Thanksgiving, punctuated by Veterans Day and those new “holidays” called Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But November, in its essence, is softer than all that. Gentler. More tender.

Today was one of those November days. The temperature was in the forties, pushing into the low fifties by midday. But with the sun shining and no breeze, it felt almost balmy.

I went outside for a walk, waiting for our cat Bubble to catch up. He was prowling around in the bushes, busy with his own feline agenda. He’s been more attached since we put Mama Cat down in August—following me, sleeping on the bed, curling up in my lap. But today, he wandered again. And instead of worrying, as I once would have, I found myself at peace.

He was fine. I was fine. The day was fine.

When Bob and I first got married, I remember a November day so different from this one—gray and cold. I walked down to the pond with our dog, Wolf. The trees were already skeletal. And in the sky, a lone goose flew over us.

That startled me, because geese tend to travel in pairs. They mate for life, or so I’ve been told.

Wolf and I went back to the house and walked in, and it was very quiet. Bob was taking a nap, and so I laid down beside him in bed. He rolled over toward me, still half asleep, and I told him about the lone goose and asked what might have happened to its partner. It might have gotten sick, he said. Or maybe it was shot during hunting season.

I lay there, quiet, remembering what it felt like to be alone. I curled closer, grateful for a partner beside me, and drifted into sleep with his arms around me.

I’ve been thinking about that lately—the way November ushers us inward. The days shrink. The sun disappears by five o’clock. By eight p.m., it feels like time to climb into bed. Our bodies lose track of rhythm. Sometimes we lie awake at two in the morning wondering what hour it really is.

And yet… November is also peaceful. It’s restorative in ways we forget to honor.

Yesterday morning was beautiful in its own November way. I met with my friend Jodi and members of her book club, who are studying The Only Little Prayer You Need. Jodi has given away more than forty copies of that book over the years, touching countless lives through her quiet generosity. You can imagine how it feels to know that words once whispered by Spirit through me are now whispering through others, lighting candles in places I’ll never see.

The women in her group talked about the universality of fear and love. The truth that sometimes it’s in crisis that we come to know God best. The ache of how hard we are on ourselves when we look back and decide we wasted too much time living in fear.

One woman said something so simple and so true that it caught my breath: “I got tired of missing my life.”

You could feel Spirit in that room, a circle of women holding one another through family challenges, health issues, and deep losses.

After leaving Jodi’s, before heading home, I stopped at a little mom-and-pop watch-repair-and-tailor shop to get a new watch battery. The store was tucked into the part of town near where I grew up. Walking through the door felt like stepping back into childhood.

The small room was warm with clutter: tiny drawers of watch parts stacked in the back, a TV playing The Price Is Right, the tailor adjusting a hem for a customer while her son took care of the other customers. I needed to wait a bit, so I stood near the big front window and listened to the hum of conversation, the proprietor’s cadence of “How long do you want the sleeves?” and “Let’s pin this just right.”

It was all so ordinary. A pocket of human connection. A reminder that these places—these simple, steady places—still exist.

Today has had its own kind of November rhythm—writing, laundry, cooking, preparing for the week, feeling my energy return after napping all last evening and sleeping in today. Thinking ahead to Thanksgiving in two weeks. Noticing the last glories of color on the backyard hillsides.

It also happens to be my nephew’s birthday—a tender November memory all its own. I was 13 when he was born, old enough to feel the marvel of a new life, young enough to be enchanted by babies arriving into the world. The age gap between him and me is smaller than the gap between me and my brother, his father. Another little mystery of family rhythms.

November is like that, stirring something tender and unnamed. My mother-in-law looked forward to the fall but dreaded what followed: the short days, the cold, the isolation winter sometimes brings. You sense what’s coming. You can’t hurry past it. You can only meet it.

November is a month we can meet with fear or love.

It asks almost nothing of us, except to notice. To remember that it is a threshold between color and snow, between warmth and winter, between gathering and turning inward. To realize that, in this in-between month, there is an astonishing amount of life happening in the quiet.

And maybe that’s why I wanted to write about today. Because November is like that—unremarkable on the surface, and quietly overflowing underneath.

Today was a November day. Soft. Merciful. Ordinary. Beautiful.

And I wanted to commemorate it. Before it slips away.

With blessings,

Deb

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