Fall’s Observable and Unobservable Mysteries

Fall is slipping in the door before summer has quite departed, wearing sensible shoes and socks as it ushers out its sandaled predecessor.

Autumn is the most emotional seasonal transition for me, more than the start of a new year, and even more than the miraculous arrival of spring.

The sun is setting on summer.

Labor Day weekend, in particular, is freighted with melancholy. I still can conjure my childhood dismay when unstructured days playing outside from sunup to sundown were abruptly replaced by Catholic school uniforms and weekdays bound by rules. I’d yearn then as I do now for just one more day of freedom, one more post-8 p.m. sunset, one more bike ride to the swimming hole, one more drive in movie, one more luscious bite of watermelon.

These days I know enough to savor the last wild blueberries of the season and our final ocean swim, tell myself fall is a great time to get organized and focused after the long days of summer and the illusion of endless time to accomplish whatever needs to be done. In September and October it will be easier to keep my head in my work, I tell myself.  I won’t be tempted to laze around when I should be writing, to play when I should be working.

Take joy in the Zinnias while they last.

(I’m not sure if those personal pep talks work.)

I’m also more conscious now of autumn’s philosophical meaning—the season of endings. The garden stops producing, the leaves turn color and abandon their trees, and the zinnias are taken by the frost.

Sooner than we can imagine on this bright Labor Day, this will happen.

Amidst the many changes surrounding us, it’s not a big jump to both retroactively and preemptively grieve the bigger losses in our lives, of time and of people.

Mary Oliver, who illuminates nature and its meanings in her work as well as any poet I’ve ever read, reeled me in today with her her poem FALL SONG:

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

FALL SONG, by Mary Oliver, first published in American Primitive, Back Bay Books, 1983.

I wish you all a good seasonal transition, my friends. Embrace the unobservable mysteries, and don’t bypass the opportunity for that last swim.

  Brenda Buchanan brings years of experience as a journalist and a lawyer to her crime fiction. She has published three books featuring Joe Gale, a newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. She’s now hard at work on new projects. FMI, go to http://brendabuchananwrites.com