Breathing Ink and Ilex

I see all these bloggers posting about how it is autumn in their part of the world. A lot of us live in the States, so I've been wondering anxiously, "When will it get to be our turn for autumn here?" Well, I think our time has finally come. Our weather between seasons is fickle and unstable, and changes as I might try to change gears on a stick-shift. But I think, as October rolls in (where did the year go!) it is finally autumn. I lay awake the other night thinking about the upcoming months: apple-picking, birthdays (so many birthdays) involving food and cake and presents and people getting together and laughing, Thanksgiving dinner, the onset of really cold weather and Christmas... (Most of my family's celebrations centre around eating food. It's the Sicilian in us, I suppose.) Nearly twenty-one autumns, each one like amber and held up to the light, lie in my memory, and I took them out as I lay awake the other night to look at them, and they are so very beautiful. They are full of romping in the short crisp grass, playing in the leaves, taking walks down windy roads, eating and talking and laughing with my family, arriving at the church Thanksgiving dinner in the suit of Roman armour my husband made for me... It's a crazy, blowy, amber-coloured time. And here I am at last, standing on the brink of one more autumn.

I sat the other day on my parents' patio, soaking in the late sunlight and autumn wind, reading Knight's Fee, and I could sympathize with Randal's feelings of strange homecoming as he arrived for the first time at Dean. Autumn always feels a little like homecoming to me, and at the same time as though home is a long way off. Maybe it is the Sabbath-feeling, that the whole part of my world has come to the twilight of the year to rest, and that's what makes me think of home. The dogwoods are changing into their best garnet colours; the hollies are putting out their little scarlet berries and the crows are screaming over them. Everything is so beautiful, so varied, so jewel-like. The leaves are all dying on the trees; it's strange that death can look so lovely as that, blood-coloured and fierce. I wonder if there is a moral somewhere in that.

"Pray that thy last days, and last works, may be the best; and that when thou comest to die, thou mayest have nothing else to do but die."
Vavasor Powell

Flowers are pretty in spring, and green is a fine colour, but nothing compares to the last burst of show the trees put on in autumn. They quite outdo themselves. Soon the maples will be turning, and the gumball tree, and the pecans will be littering the driveway with little banana-peel leaves, and I'll be able to sit in the heart of all that colour, reading and writing (because these things are done best in autumn) underneath all that surf-sound of wind in the trees, cleaning out my veins with the cleanness of autumn.