The seasons change, but while they do, they remain essentially the same. I think about that as I look at autumn once again and wonder whether I feel any different. The familiar colors and rhythms are all around me, bringing back memories of autumns past. Revisiting something I wrote in 1999 is like hearing an echo that continues to fuel my mind and my pen today. The ideas and the voice remain much the same, even as life moves on and the people who once shared those autumn days with me find their own places in the world. Allow me to take you back as we revisit a season that just happens to be my favorite…
Autumn leaves are among my favorite things. Yes, I admit to rhapsodizing about their greenness a couple of seasons ago. Call me fickle. But now is the time when leaves express their individuality, not only from tree to tree but even along the same branch. The different ways each leaf ages and eventually falls make fall foliage the next best thing to viewing Impressionist paintings. Indeed, many leaves inspired such art in the first place.
With our busy household and little time for organized excursions to the Mohawk Trail and other northern hot spots, we have to keep our leaf-peeping local. You don’t have to venture far on the SouthCoast to find profusions of color. So, what if the weatherman says it’s not as spectacular as last year? It doesn’t have to be. Almost anywhere you look — across the many necks that reach into Buzzards Bay, throughout the villages and tree-lined city streets, or along the more heavily wooded back roads — you’ll find flecks of color.
A friend in Florida asked in a recent letter whether the leaves were changing color. She included a picture of a farm scene somewhere in New England, its signature fall hues almost three-dimensional in their brilliance.
I don’t need that sort of color to experience the heights of autumn. A lot depends on the sky’s mood, anyhow. When it’s overcast, the colors are muted. When it’s bright blue, the contrast is wild — the inspiration for many a poem or song, not to mention certain shades in the Crayola crayon box. Yellowing elm and aspen leaves, psychedelic maple leaves, burnished oak leaves, and crimson berry bushes and vines create an invigorating display.
“Let’s go leaf hunting,” suggests my daughter. She wants to add leaves to her collection of pressed flowers. I need no prodding. Leaf collecting is a wonderful blast from my own past. As a youngster, I used to head with my friends to a section of woods along the Charles River in search of the perfect leaf. The one leaf that signified fall — that blend of scarlet and salmon, with touches of gold and a whisper of green.
We’d climb or bend back branches to reach the ultimate specimen. If, upon closer inspection, it wasn’t up to snuff, we’d discard it onto the ground among the many layers of not-so-lucky leaves. The search lasted for hours on many an autumn afternoon. Our so-called perfect specimens were later ironed between sheets of wax paper and saved for posterity. No doubt they turned up during the next spring cleaning, all crinkled in a drawer or closet, only to be quietly disposed of by my mother.
After digging potatoes with her father and brothers, my daughter was still hankering to harvest leaves, having presented the idea to me earlier that day. But it was getting late, too dark to spot the good ones, so we settled for some reading. We found an appropriate passage in Around the Year by Elsa Beskow, a well-known Scandinavian children’s author, translated into English:
“Golden you are October. Golden sovereigns on your trees. Golden guineas on your floor, golden coins of leaves that fall for us to scuffle through and rustle and rattle and hustle and scrabble and dabble and paddle as they fall into an October carpet which hides our shoes.”
This may not have been the best year for leaf-peeping, but we would still go a-leaf-hunting on a bright, clear autumn day and “scrabble and dabble” about nature’s vivid carpet.
When I wrote this, Olivia was 8 years old. She is now 35 and living in Paris, making her own way in the world. The little girl who wanted to collect leaves and add them to her pressed-flower collection has become a woman with a life and adventures of her own. And, as it turns out, some things haven’t changed.
Recently, Olivia guest-wrote this column, sending her thoughts on autumn from a gray morning in Paris. Her piece, titled “Nobody Does October Like New England,” was a love letter to the season she misses so much. She wrote about the apples, pumpkins, foliage, haunted hayrides and childhood memories that make October here so special. Living abroad has only sharpened her appreciation for what she once might have taken for granted. As she put it, “no one does fall like New England.”
I smiled as I read her words. Here I was, revisiting a piece in which an 8-year-old wanted to go leaf hunting with her mother, while that same daughter, now thousands of miles away, was writing about those very pleasures. Perhaps our love of autumn is one of those things that gets passed along without either of us realizing it. Somehow, across all these years and miles, we still see autumn through much the same eyes.
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”—Albert Camus
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean