Over the last month, I've been time-travelling backwards through fall. I started October in Vermont, where the temperatures lingered in the 30s at night and barely crested the 50s in the days. The cooler turned the maple leaves green to rust, occasional splashes of yellow and red up and down mountainsides. I'm told that sometimes in Vermont, if you hit the fall foliage just right and if the magical balance of rain, sunshine, cool days but not too cold all coalesce, the mountains look psychedelic. The fall trips I've taken to Goddard College, where I teach, tend to land me there in more muted years, but still, mountains of maples in fall create an autumnal world of wonder, color, and light.
Going backwards in fall a bit, we drove the long way up and back last weekend to Madison, Wisconsin to see our son. The roadside greenery get distinctly yellower. By the time we got to Madison, the trees were dazzling red, orange, and tumbles of every shade of gold and green. The prairie we walked last Sunday, just east of Mount Horeb, shone blond with the grasses starting to show glimpses of red. I shivered some standing on a porch without a coat one night, yet by mid-day, the crisp air warmed and cooled me at once.
Now it's edging toward the end of October, and Lawrence, like all the other places I visited, is late is autumn. Our mid-October peak hasn't yet arrived, and what has is quieter than many years because of a very dry September and not quite the perfect balance of temperature and moisture. Yet the slowness of fall falling shows its speed across trees that span dark green to dark orange in one fell sweep.
All my life, I've loved fall, watching the waking world swirling itself from one thing to another. Sure, there's the hit-over-the-head symbolism of age and death coming, beauty changing to bareness, and all that letting go-ness. But there's also "a certain slant of light," to quote Emily Dickinson. The blues of the blue sky are bluer, setting sharp the contrast with all that brightening, fading, and falling.
