Autumn is coming. After what has felt like the longest hottest muggiest summer in recent history.
I wake up, and there is a cool wet breeze on my face through my window. The skies have been uniformly grey. Even the green leaves have started to look a bit different. They obviously haven’t changed color yet, but they are preparing to give up the green ghost. They have that: “Okay, I’ve just about had it” look to them.
I walk to the grocery store in the wet twilight, blurry headlights coming at me, the sound of tires through the puddles, a slight chill in the air.
I hate the summer. Autumn is my time. My season. Autumn is when I wake up. I suppose I could work to change that pattern, and try to embrace the summer – but frankly, life is too short. Autumn is only glorious because of the sweating and slogging through the months of hot days and nights.
My friend Kate put it perfectly. We were discussing our shared apathy for the dog days of summer. We focused primarily on how we hate the heat, we aren’t sunbathers, we slather 45 all over our bodies obsessively, we get irritated in the heat, etc. But she brought the discussion to another level when she said, calmly, “There’s no irony in the summer.”
I burst out laughing. I laughed because I recognized the truth in her words.
There is no irony in the summer! Autumn is when subtlety can play a part again, when complexity exists … when two things can compete at the same time: exhilaration and nostalgia, for example: two “emotions” which I associate with autumn. And they usually go hand in hand.
I don’t know what it’s all about … perhaps it’s the old sense-memory of being in school for so many years. Autumn is when you get your act together, your days get more structured, school starts. The smell of chalk, the slam of lockers, the ringing bell … All of that still works on me, somewhere, in my subconscious.
Along with all of this personal stuff, is, now, the approach of September 11.
The beauty of that morning has been discussed, the literally cloud-less sky, the beaming sunlight. The beginning of a crisp autumn day. School starting up that week. The great shift in the energy which comes along with the start of a school year.
A nostalgia for time passing. A wistfulness that the summer is over, and it’s time to get down to work. But also: an exhilaration, an energy, a buzz in the air – because it is good to get back to work.
This is my milieu. This is where I feel most like Sheila. I was born in November, so maybe there’s a little of that going on … I was born in the dead of autumn, so of course, I feel that it is MY season.
John Keats wrote “Ode to Autumn” which, I believe, captures perfectly what autumn holds, what autumn’s potential is, what the season means to humanity. There may be a more beautiful poem written, I suppose. But I have a hard time believing that there could be.
And so, let’s get SHEILA to stop writing, and let’s listen to Keats, a master if there ever was one:
ODE TO AUTUMN
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o’erbrimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
