Prayer at church Sunday: Oh, Lord, please restore my sense of humor. Too much concentration upon politics recently, like a steady diet of Romaine lettuce, has left me bitter and cynical. Time to switch gears.
Temperatures this past week have abruptly dipped into the low sixties in the evening and have hovered around seventy during the day. Compared to the unrelenting humidity and heat of these past three months it is as if we’ve been suddenly transported to a different hemisphere, house and all. School started again today, and I’m in the middle of the last-minute enrollment minuet. I didn’t get half the things done on my summer to-do list that I hoped to accomplish, and as usual I’m kicking myself for the ways I managed to waste time.
But I love Fall. That’s the upside. I love the earthy smell of moldering leaves, the depth and variety of autumn colors, especially in New England, especially in the woodlands surrounding my home. The sky is an almost painful shade of blue; the air is apple-crisp, and the midges, mosquitoes, deerflies and blackflies that can turn a country summer into an unmitigated hell are fading away. The tropical palette of uniform green upon green is beginning to blend into a technicolor movie of greys, greens, golds, browns, bronzes, coppers, silver, and every shade of red and orange imaginable.
Even the air of melancholy that accompanies the slow pavane to winter is to my liking. A constant California-style paradise of unchanging warmth, no matter how beautiful, would quickly pall. I need contrast. Change is good.
The cats like autumn. These cooler nights perk up their energy levels, especially Briana, who with her kidney problems had trouble staying hydrated in the heat and humidity of just two weeks ago. She’s regained some of her old feisty obnoxious assertiveness, pushing her way onto my lap or across my keyboard when she decides I’m not paying nearly enough attention to cats. Isobel for her part is watching the redoubled gathering efforts of the local chipmunk population with a barely restrained bloodlust. She sits for hours in a tense, grey-and-white crouch on the sill of the screened living-room window and chitters at the little striped interlopers who stare boldly at her from three feet away, heads swollen to twice their size with their enormous, seed-filled cheek pouches.
Fall tastes like hot cider, woodsmoke, apple pie with a hunk of cheddar cheese on the side, and baked acorn squash with local honey and fresh butter. It is Sunday morning waffles with maple syrup, the rustle and snap of dry twigs underfoot, the diesel roar of school buses, glowing yellow as they pass by the fading greens of late summer lawns. Fall feels like corduroy jackets, flannel sheets, the rough bark of logs in the woodpile, the unexpected bonk on the noggin by acorns as I walk under the oaks by the post office. The sunsets blaze across the river as the angle of the sun changes, its light orange-red, reflecting off the eddies as tiny disconnected bits of flame.
There are times I wish the New Year occurred in the late Fall–perhaps in November, at the close of harvest-time–rather than in January. It would make much more sense to me. We would celebrate the harvest, and with it, the symbolic fruits of the previous twelve month’s labor, and then begin the new year with a contemplative, cold-and-snow-laden wait until the first hopeful days of spring. This would jibe very well with the way the traditional school year imprints itself on our (mainly Western) sensibilities. Growing up, the elegiac nature of the season for me–and I suspect for many others–was less laden with personal symbolism, countered as it was then by the excitement of starting fresh with a new teacher, new subjects, new classmates, and new back-to-school clothes and pencil boxes. Since going back to school two years ago, that long-faded sense of possibility has come back to me full force; but since I’m also well past childhood and have already lost friends to illness and accident, the bittersweet reminders of mortality in the flash and fade of foliage are overlaid upon this sense of new beginnings in a way no ten-year-old kid could possibly know.
The cats aren’t the only ones who find new energy in the waning of summer heat. I managed last week to make a small dent in the enormous stash of crap, the accumulated possessions of half a lifetime stored in the attic and cellar. I’m absorbed in the un-chipmunk task of giving away stuff–carting books to my church library, unworn and outgrown clothing to the Salvation Army, and consolidating the scattered smaller boxes of photos, keepsakes and letters to larger cartons for inventory and archiving. I have eleven more cartons of hardcover books and five boxes of magazines, carefully packed, still lying untouched in the crawl space where we had placed them upon moving here. I hope at some point we can afford to build the bookshelves we’ve planned for the den. And if I could only get my Significant Other to divest himself of the bankers’ boxes of thirty- and forty-year-old comic books he brought with him from our first apartment (and hasn’t looked at since!)…
In a while it’ll be time to dig out the mulled cider mix, the warm houserobes, the winter blankets, the medieval recipes book and the antifreeze. Maybe next summer there’ll be more sun than rain so we can finally restain the shingles and put in some perennial beds. But for now, there’s fall pruning, taking in the screens, splitting and piling firewood, laying in spare parts for the snowblower and cleaning out the fireplace. It’s never too early. And as we anticipate the snow to come we’ll walk the country roads around our house and take photos of all the red and gold while there is time.
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