Category: Noah Kahan

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As New Englanders know, each year has six seasons: the usual spring, summer, autumn, winter, plus mud season—between winter and spring—and stick season—between autumn and winter.

I’ve written about mud season before (https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2019/03/). Now it’s time to talk about stick season. 

You know about our autumns and winters. These are the seasons in all those lovely photographs of New England. You know, the flaming foliage ones, mountains ablaze in orange, yellow, and red, and the snowy ones, white trees bowing as skiers whiz past. But in between—usually it’s the entire month of November but it could be December as well—the leaves have left, the snow hasn’t arrived, and the trees become stick figures. “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” to quote Mr. Shakespeare.

Stick season has been getting a lot of press these days, thanks to a young singer named Noah Kahan, whose song “Stick Season” about the pain of lost love—“And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks/ And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed…”—was a viral hit in 2022. (And as synchronicity would have it, as I was planning this blog, he sang it on Saturday Night Live, December 2nd. Check it out on YouTube.)

For years, Shakespeare and Kahan described the way I felt about this time of year. As readers of this blog and my book, The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey, know, my daughter Laurie entered Eastern Maine Medical Center in November of 1988 and died there on December 23^rd. For those two months, I lived at a Ronald McDonald house about a mile away and walked back and forth to the hospital twice a day along the Penobscot River, where the skeletal maples, elms, birches, and oaks mocked any hope for Laurie’s recovery.

Over the next 30 years, each stick season was the backdrop for my anger, sorrow, withdrawal, guilt, and shame, exacerbated by a holiday season, which now starts about November 1, with its Hallmark images of healthy happy families gathered round a perfectly shaped Christmas tree. Throw in the Christian season of Advent—four weeks of paradoxical readings about Christ the child and Christ the judge, sin and grace, justice and mercy, comfort and challenge—and I came to dread this time of year.

But about five years ago, thanks to my Al Anon program, I was able to separate my shame, guilt, and anger from my grief. I saw that because of growing up in a family riddled with alcoholism, those noxious emotions were there long before Laurie died. And I realized that I didn’t have to hang on to them to grieve the sorrow and emptiness that one must accept when they lose a loved one. That I could feel sad without feeling angry. 

At the same time—and I’m sure it was no coincidence—as I walked the woods behind our house, I began to appreciate the stark beauty of stick season. Without all the foliage, the sky is larger, and sometimes it’s a November blue unlike at any other time of the year. The wind is bracing. The flies are gone. Unlike in mud season, the paths are still dry. Even the sticks themselves—the tree branches—have a stark beauty, like Japanese calligraphy. 

 I started to see the departed leaves as images of my departing shame, guilt, and anger.

Which helped me see Advent as a time for letting the spirit blow away what the Bible often calls our “iniquities,” but what I think of as my “survival mechanisms”: those behaviors I developed as a kid to survive family disfunction, but which have become injurious not only to my health but to those around me. 

These days I think of stick season as a time to simplify my life. Which has been especially easy this year. After 37 years of hosting a Thanksgiving for anywhere from ten to 24 people, Mary Lee and I turned over the apron to her younger son, who, along with his fiancé, did a fantastic job feeding and making us all feel comfortable.

Last week, Mary Lee retired after 22 years as the ordained Deacon at our Episcopal Church. For 22 years, churchy stuff has filled not only our Sundays, but other days of the week, as I have also been an active member of St. Paul’s. Now, as is our diocesan policy, we will worship elsewhere for a while. We will listen for other callings to where—as Aristotle said—the needs of the world and our talents cross.

Sadly, but I guess appropriately, our cat Zeke has used up his 9^th life (I didn’t think he’d make it to 2023), leaving our house pet-less for the first time in our marriage.

I have given up driving 30 miles once a week to play in my old-time music jams. Mary Lee and I have decided we no longer enjoy going out for dinner once a week.

So, I suppose, I am in the stick season of my life. If so, it’s not bad. 

Let’s talk about Advent again. One thing I’ve always had trouble with is this idea that not only are we awaiting the celebration of the birth of Jesus, but we are supposed to be awaiting the Second Coming of Christ, when, according to some scripture passages, Christ will come to judge us and send some of us to hell and some of us to heaven. 

Sorry, I can’t buy the judgment thing. My experience is that I’m surrounded by Grace, if I can just (“just’? Ha!) open my eyes to it. So that when Jesus tells his disciples to “Keep awake!”—which he does a lot—I think he’s talking about opening our eyes to what’s already there, not what’s going to suddenly appear descending from a cloud.

Sort of like seeing the sky that’s always there, but only fully visible during stick season. 

So, for me, the Second Coming is an invitation to awaken into a new consciousness, a new appreciation, a new seeing, of life, the universe, and everything.

I watched a YouTube interview with Noah Kahan, in which he said that his hit song  represented a new musical path for him. And as blogger Mitch Teemley wrote recently about Advent, the word serves as the root of our word “adventure,” which, of course, I like because that makes me think of “pilgrimage.” “In short,” as Mitch wrote about Advent and I would write about pilgrimage,  it is “an experience that can change a person forever. If they let it.”

I’m going to stick with that for a Wile.

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