When the nip is in the air, what words do we have for fall?

Kate Flora: When my boys were little, we used to have word lists posted on the refrigerator both to improve their vocabularies, and to encourage creativity and kindness in their name-calling. Lists that began: Don’t call your brother an idiot, instead try…followed by all sorts of possibilities. It’s not my fault. My family has always had a fascination with word play. My brother John is the world’s best (or worst) punster, and I own a zillion books about word origins and the development of language. Growing up there was always a dictionary within reach of the dinner table and my boys grew up the same way. I even have (of course) the giant two volume Oxford English Dictionary—the one with the little drawer and a magnifying glass—and I use it. It’s more fun to know both the definition and the origin of a word.

Once, early in the Thea Kozak series, I had a list on the wall of a dozen words for pain—she was always mixing it up with the bad guys—and another time it was pages of words for colors. Plenty of words for the seasons. The weather. What can I say? I’m a writer. I like words.

One wonderful recent gift from my son was a book to help with describing the landscape called Home Ground. Another that gets pulled off the shelf is Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively. And a third is an old college textbook, much underlined, called Fine Frenzy: Enduring Themes in Poetry.

This week, the sudden, and unwanted, nip in the air sent me scurrying to my trusty Rodale’s Synonym Finder for words to describe what is happening, thinking it would be fun to share some of them with you, and Rodale’s was a bust.

I looked up autumn and got fall and harvest. I looked up equinox and it wasn’t there at all. Undaunted, I grabbed my Bartlett’s, source of a hundred epigrams, and sighed with relief. Words, crunchy, powerful, evocative words. There are those who see autumn as sadness and an end, and those for whom it is a time of ripening and crescendo. I often turn to poetry when I’m searching for a description or a word or a phrase to underscore a mood.

Arthur Symons give us:

The gray-green stretch of sandy grass,

Indefinitely desolate;

A sea of lead, a sky of slate;

Already autumn in the air, alas!

And Matthew Arnold:

Coldly, sadly descends

The autumn evening. The field,

Strewn with its dank yellow drifts

Of withered leaves, and the elms,

Fad into dimness apace

And Tennyson captures what my small boys would have described as “happy sad,”

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depths of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more

As does Shelley:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling lit its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet, though in sadness.

John Dryden gives us a good phrase for aging long:

Of no distemper, of no blast he died.

But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed

long—

For some of us, autumn is a season for slowing down, and contemplation, as in this, from Thomas Hood:

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn

Stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence

And Laura St. Martin, in “As I Look Out” captures the transition from summer into fall:

As I look out from the desk window

Fingering the new books

I see a quiet afternoon

Caught in a crack between summer and fall

Summer is evaporating on the lawns

And I watch in deep brown anticipation

As the fog which held that last warm night

Takes away the flowered dresses

Suntanned legs and swimming pools

Thin clouds and sunlight argued over the morning

Mornings that still whisper bandanas and beaches

But Fall will have it all soon

When her sharp breath blows away any lingering

And sends us scurrying back to schoolhouses all bundled up

Scurrying back to realities and glories on the wane

These writers remind us to slow down and contemplate the world around us. There is no better time for that than in fall, as the leaves turn, the fields grow golden, pumpkins ripen, and the last tomatoes struggle to turn red.

Do you have “fall” word that you like? A poem, a quote, and phrase that comes to mind as the days shorten and the air grows cool?

For those reading this or other posts this week, one of you who leaves a comment will win a copy of  my first Thea Kozak mystery, Chosen for Death.