Originally published in The Fox River Patriot, September, 1978. Reprinted here especially for the Zen Mama of Hoarded Ordinaries.
One has to admit, at the outset, that autumn has much to recommend it.
The hard squash and pumpkins grow fat and golden in the garden, or in the corn rows. The rest of the fall harvest is bountiful, and the hours spent laboring under a full summer sun, in hot wind, are generously rewarded. We eat well in fall, will continue to eat well through the long winter - squash in the cellar and some of it in the freezer, jars of canned produce set in rows on dark shelves.
In autumn the fat old hens are butchered, to make room in the chicken coop for the fresh and eager pullets. Plucking the hens and cleaning them, one conjures up the February kitchen, heavy with the aroma of chicken stew on the stove; in the imagination, the warm, moist air filling the kitchen fogs the cold windowpanes. The stew is thick, rich as only the golden yellow fat of the old hen can make it. Butchering the hens, one is admitting that he is vulnerable, that the winds of February will chill him to the bone.
As the killing frost of autumn approaches, dew hangs heavy on the grass and the leaves of the trees. The sun splashes the eastern sky with several shades of rose in the dawning day, the hues reflected in the still surface of the quiet pond.
The blazing color in the leaves of the trees is reflected in the pond, too. There is fire in the treetops, but not one that consumes, turning the leaves to ashes; instead the leaves are kissed with the colors of fire and they begin to drop. In the stillness, each cuts its own exacting path through the silence of the morning air; as no two snow flakes are ever alike, the descent of each leaf is remarkably its own, a final lingering statement on how the world is and how it turns.
The slanted light of the morning sun - as it climbs above the rim of the horizon - glistens off the pond and off treetops and housetops and rolling fields. If you pause, momently, planting yourself in the exact spot, you can see morning's golden coin poised for an instant above a silo, a dot over its "i."
Mornings later, the world is tinted white. The chill in the air at dawn after the first hard frost is invigorating. Scraping the thin, white skin of autumn off the car windows before you leave for work you feel your senses sharpen and your pulse quicken as at no other season.
Overhead, geese are honking; their wavering vees become one of the season's sure marks, as indisputable as pages torn off a calendar, as certain as the turn of the falling leaf. The vees of geese fall southward year after year, riding a chill wind.
Yet for all its bounty and its blazing beauty, autumn is the season on my loneliness. Each brilliantly painted leaf dropping off a tree marks the world for winter, marks the world for death. The honking of the geese is a warning. For when all the leaves have fallen, the trees will be left bare and stark, only the bones of themselves. The surface of the still pond will turn to ice, no more to reflect autumn's fleeting beauty, its transient loveliness. Autumn is the great betrayer: instead of a world tinted quietly white, we will - all of us, humans and animals and plants - soon be buried in a shroud of snow. Autumn is the season of death.
Darkening clouds moving towards winter begin to hang low in the morning sky, obscuring the sun.
The rain, when it comes, and it does, drives in at hard, cold angles, chilling the earth.
The cast of the sky at sunset isolates each building in the farmyards one drives past; separates, by the turn of its light, the rows of corn in the field from the land already harvested; divides even the rows of still-standing corn from each other, and each hill of corn from the next.
The brown standing stalks still hold their ears of corn, pointed towards spring, seed and hope for the future; yet in the isolating light of the finishing sky, the dark stalks have already been marked for death and the sound of their dry leaves rustling in a slight evening breeze heralds the end of the world.
Autumn is the season of the world's coming apart, when the ears of corn are torn from the stalks, the squash from their vines, leaves from the trees, crops from the land; and the land is left only to itself.
Autumn is the season when geese are knocked from the sky by patient hunters; when ducks are dropped from graceful flight into a shock of cold water, to be retrieved gently by dogs with the jaws of death; when startled pheasants take to the air in a greying world, to be challenged by a stiff wind and a breastful of shot.
Autumn is the season when deer are taken, the small quiet sounds they make - dying - becoming the murmur of a world closing upon itself.
Turtles, burrowing deep into the soft ground or the mud at the bottom of ponds; toads, pushing their way into the earth; woodchucks and bears, moving towards hibernation; all these animals are rehearsing their deaths.
Autumn is the season of one's first experience with school; the child is removed from the family, to become his own person in a world larger than the familiar house or the block in town he was permitted to explore, larger even than the farmyard and the animals he knew intimately. In fall, at school, the youngster starts the process that leads to his individuality and, ultimately, to the isolation that being oneself entails. Though he remains part of the family, as autumn deepens into winter the child becomes his own separate self.
It was in autumn when two brothers struck off after school, when they should have been home doing their farm chores, for one last bareback ride on the neighbor's horses, a gallop across the empty corn fields; and it was a time, when the brothers returned to the farmyard, for the last spanking of autumn, a punishment for outright disobedience, for ignoring previous warnings. Yet the brothers knew that autumn made its own demands on them, that the threat of winter outweighed the pain of any punishment. And they knew they would do it again: take that last, frightening ride at breakneck speed across the darkening land; the chill of fright running up and down one's spine astride the last horse of autumn is a delight, a sign of life in a dying world.
Autumn is the season the farm boy is taken out of school to help with corn picking, to work like a man in a man's world, to make the world partly his own; and, doing so, to lose part of what he belongs to.
It is the season that finds young men and women going off to school, college, university, truly alone in the world for the first time; the season that ushers in the first pangs of homesickness, an irrevocable loneliness, a full sense of oneself alone in the world.
As leaves drop from the trees in autumn, the family begins to come apart. It will come back together again and again, just as buds recur on the trees every year. Still, the essential seams in the family's relationships are revealed. Isolation becomes a fact of life.
Autumn is the season a man and the woman he loved decided to marry; to bring their separate selves together for life; in their isolation to find comfort in each other, in the warmth of companionship, affection, love. And in autumn they see their own daughters starting off to school, see the promise written on every blazing leaf that their family, like every family, will come apart eventually, daughters spiraling off into their own universes.
It is the season of the first drift of wood smoke, crisp in the air, logs laid next to each other, fire blazing. For one, the smell of wood smoke in autumn may transport him to an earlier age, when life is thought to have been simpler. For another, the primitive fragrance of burning wood surely triggers a further loneliness: individual logs blazing side by side in a pot-bellied stove; the fire, like the fuse that drives all life, consumes them relentlessly.
Only this, as life consumes us, as autumn closes in, brings comfort: the logs and the kindling and the chips of wood give themselves to a common purpose, to a single roaring fire and a steady heat. In autumn, we know we are burning ourselves out, each of us - that is the loneliness, the fire dying and the ashes turning cold; yet we recognize, too, that we unite in the blaze, that what causes our undoing is also what binds us. As autumn's long night moves into morning, the cold ashes mingle, sifting themselves together; the logs, which can no longer be distinguished from each other, finally yield what they hold in common: and it is dust to dust and ashes to ashes.
Autumn is the season of our common loneliness, as certain as the turn of the falling leaf.
Comments