I love Autumn. I love the changing colors of the leaves, and the crisp winds that blow through them. As a kid I always thought Autumn as being kind of magical, the way they changed color and the air grew cooler. Being raised in Florida gave me a kind of skewed view of the season, but some leaves and trees turned color, and it went from 90 degrees to 60, but I still loved it. Being older and now living in a place that gets four seasons, Autumn means even more.
Many see Autumn as a decline; the seasonal slope towards the ‘death’ of Winter. Many ancient cultures viewed it this way; writers and poets and songwriters still do. How many melancholy songs and poems and stories describe the loneliness and creeping sadness of Autumn, and it’s inevitable slide into the looming emptiness of Winter? I’m of Celtic/Germanic stock so that kind of imagery appeals to me. It always makes me think of the end of my senior year of high school, when everything I knew was ending; my family had effectively fallen apart, my friends were drifting apart, the day to day life of school was rapidly coming to an end, and adult life was fast approaching to a frightening and unknowable expanse.
But I remember walking the streets and seeing the brown and gold leaves tumble in the chill wind, and being mesmerized by it. I fell in love with it. Despite my own looming winter of the soul, I felt comforted by it, by the leaves and the wind, like it knew and sympathized how I felt. And that it was ok, because it, like the Autumn, had come in its time for its due, yet it too would pass, and the green of spring would return. There is a dark beauty in decay, in the ending of things, because you know that from death comes life, and the Spring will return.
I love Autumn.
