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It's interesting to be writing about fall when I'm in the autumn of my own life.
For many years now, fall has emphasized the quiet. The house feels big and empty. No hustling for the first day of school. No pencils to sharpen, no trips to the shoe store, no lunch sacks waiting on the hallway bench. Three of them. Each with an apple.
I'm trying to recall one first day of school in detail, and it escapes me. Time has taken those days from me and combined them into a collective memory: one box of Cheerios. One mad dash to the bus stop. One braid.
The signs that point to the end of summer are different for me now. The docks on the lake disappear one by one, like wooden ships departing for an unknown port. I spot a pumpkin at the farm stand. The corn is gone, and all the tomatoes have found their Mason jars.
There is a picture from my childhood. It made the newspaper, when newspapers still shared cheer. My brother and his friend had been playing in the leaves, and a photographer happened by, seeing two round faces peeking through the heap. Toothless smiles. Front page.
And the Portage Trail with its leaf-strewn path and the long branches of the maples that beckoned us in. It was beautiful in October--the color gold. We'd roast hot dogs over a campfire by Buttermilk Falls and then make our way toward Westfield, ascending a steep hill to emerge like little wanderers into a field of purple, pungent grapes.
The smells of childhood autumn stay with us---earthy, leafy, apples past their prime. My grandmother's back porch and her basement root cellar on Windsor Street smelled deep and ancient well into winter.
We lived closer to the earth when I was a kid--piles of sticks and leaves, muddy shoes, the feel of hands inside a pumpkin. And there's something elemental that I miss, like a place I can no longer visit.
I come close to it again when I pick grapes at Johnston's Winery in October, when we fill straw baskets with our clusters, hanging like small chandeliers of summer--purple globes crowded together, some plump and gleaming, others veiled in a soft silver dust. They gather around their wiry green stems like a little congregation, shoulder to shoulder, heavy with sweetness, each one holding a drop of summer sunlight beneath its skin.
There was a cider mill we visited growing up, tall, shiny, red with a big wooden wheel at its center. Inside, cool air slipped through open doors, carrying the sweet-sharp smell of crushed apples, damp wood, old beams, burlap, maybe cinnamon. I remember it but its edges are frayed, as if I'm watching a silent movie. In this autumn, some memories feel like a life that I lived before this one.
There are people who only know fall by way of Robert Frost or films about prep schools tucked away in the hills and woods of New England. They've never seen for themselves leaves scuttle across a walkway, or a pumpkin patch on the side of the road, looking like a field full of suns waiting to be carried home.
They don't know our apple trees, branches bowed with fruit. They don't know the smell of wet leaves gathered along the curb, or woodsmoke drifting from a chimney on the first cold evening of the year. They've never heard geese overhead while standing in a yard gone suddenly quiet, or felt that first October morning when the air feels different--as if carrying some ancient message that time has passed again.
For us, fall has never been merely beautiful. It is something we enter. Something we smell and gather and rake and burn and bake. Something that crunches under our shoes and stains our hands and makes us look up at hillsides we have seen a hundred times and wonder how they could possibly be that beautiful again.
As children, we did not stop to admire autumn. It was more that we lived inside it.
Still, there are moments from childhood that remain somewhere within us, even if the intensity is gone. We cannot return to the child who lived inside the fall. We can only catch glimpses of her now.
Perhaps that is why autumn grows more beautiful as we grow older. We finally understand what the child could not: that everything that shines around us is already passing away.