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The Quality Of Light In October

It’s an autumn day in Western New York and I’m sitting at Tim Horton’s on Second Street with my friend Julie. She’s been up to RIT to watch her daughter row on the Genesee River. Later they all went apple picking nearby, gathering baskets of ripe apples. Her photos shine with life.

We are hoping this year we’ll have some real color, we say, unlike last year’s damp forest deluge of leaves seemingly overnight, green to brown. But this year’s promising. Today it was 40 degrees at dawn, and 60 degrees at noon. Later, I drove around the lake, enjoying the lake from every possible view. The blue of the sky matched the water, and the water danced with light.

My father believed we store memories due to the quality of light in our visual fields, that memories have little to do with occasion (or we would recall all major events of importance and of course, we do not). But instead we recall–or at least I do–smaller things–sitting at a table, having coffee, holding hands, a whispered comment, a touch by one’s mother, the smell of marigolds, a dance move, a smile–all flashes of life like slides in a film.

And there’s more to autumn’s light, so bright, one can see the world better, yet it’s mournful too. It marks the endings of things, warmth and summer and birdsong. I still love the season, but now I’m moved as well by the autumn’s somber tones. I was telling a friend today “Let’s go, I said, we’ll take the Kabob Road and then the Glasgow Road to the Fredonia Stockton Road, and just there at the top of that hill, where on a day just like this you can see the city of Buffalo in the distance, 50 miles northeast. It’s an astonishing sight.”

I have seen it. I have pulled my car over amidst the drying hay and browning asters and ragweed. I have stepped out and stared at the horizon. There, in the distance across a slice of Lake Erie, past Silver Creek, the City of Buffalo shone like Oz. You can’t see it in summer or spring or winter. It is visible only in the curious quality of October light.

Now for me that view is special because when I was a young girl at SUNY Fredonia I made that drive in all weathers, and the drive itself served as metaphor for the long hard road from poor, single mother to resourceful parent and teacher. It took years; it took hundreds of drives on that slice of highway back and forth, often fraught with freezing rain or three feet of snow or blinding storms. At the same time, in the great distance of mind and heart, I could see the goal I was moving ever towards. On those few days I stopped to see the glistening City of Buffalo from that country hill, I was awestruck.

So I speak of October’s quality of light and the way one feels in the fall. Sometimes my bones ache in the damp autumn. Sometimes the trees look skeletal and forlorn. Now and then I’ll hear the call of the geese far up in the sky, and if I look up I see their imperfect Vs heading somewhere, South, no doubt. Would I like to go too? But no, I’ve headed south, been there and come back again. Once in late October, I saw 2,000 geese rise at once from Bemus Bay, a cacophony so great it drowned out all human sound, a marvelous crescendo of sound and flight. It marked a season’s change. It was a symphony.

Some things are visible only in October light. So I’m enamored of October and its magic. It smells of sorrow and joy, like aged cider, like the color of beech leaves as they fall. I meet the season with joy and resignation; I find the quality of light astonishing and magical. The fog rises in the morning off the earth, ghosting the trees in my backyard. Neighbor Henry’s garden loses all its blossoms but for some nodding gold. And the bold yellow chrysanthemums on my porches, well, they gird the soul.

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