Revelations of Fall

 

Nikka and I used to make annual late November or early December Christmas shopping forays to Saskatoon.  We'd take in the shops on Broadway, have lunch at Calories and spend an hour or two at the old Mendel Art Gallery, ending with ten minutes or so in the conservatory next door, admiring the display of the brilliantly red poinsettias against the white snow in the Japanese garden just outside. Inevitably we'd need to stop in Chamberlain for a quick break.  There I heard the clerk welcome a woman by name and ask how she was.  "Not good," she replied.  "The days are so short, and I'm solar powered." 

"I'm solar powered."  I try to give that insightful woman credit when I use this description of myself on a series of rainy days or as we travel into the dark of the year. It makes me ask myself why I watch autumn so assiduously, without an iota of dread.  I watch the archways that the elms carve down the Cathedral Village streets, looking for the moment when they are pure golden light, days later admiring the light drifting beneath them. There are a couple of trees I can see from my study window that I carefully watch change: a tall aspen a few houses down and some ornamental fruit trees across the street.  After a summer of same old same old, change is welcome.  

This year, settling into fall was unusually odd.  In mid-October, I sat out in my back garden to watch the sparrows at the feeder while I chatted with my oldest friend--we go back 55 years. It was a glorious summer day.  Then the sun went down before dinner, and I shivered slightly at the incongruity. We take so many of our cues from the light.  

Fall brings a light of its own kind into my life.  I first note the changing of the season by how sunshine lights up corners of my rooms that I haven't noticed for a while.  I have a crab apple tree in my backyard, on the north side of the house, that keeps my kitchen cool through the summer.  But when its leaves begin to fall, I do a little dance in my kitchen because, midday, I can see to make a cup of tea without turning on a light.  I can admire the sparrows waiting in the branches for a turn at the feeder, where before I could only hear them--so skillfully did they hide themselves among the leaves. On the bank of Wascana Creek, there's a craggy old tree that is full of stars in the fall--tiny yellow fruit dotting the brilliant blue sky.

Our streets begin to look a little more urban, a little more open, with the leaves fallen off the cotoneasters, flowering almond, or lilacs that normally shroud the doorways and windows of our houses.  Walking at dusk, we glimpse one another's private lives: someone stirring a pot in the kitchen or a teenager dancing to hidden music. Domesticity takes on a new beauty as we think of inwardly marshalling our energy, reading the season's new books or making pizza sauce of the summer's tomatoes.

Trees losing their leaves look to me like old men and women shedding their clothes for a familiar and trustworthy lover. Normally we admire them for their green flourishing, but as they lose their leaves, I study their bark.  The craggy depth of an elm.  The twists and turns of my crab apple. The roughness of the usually serene willows. They are modelling openness for us, allowing us to see how they have grown, how they have been wounded by storms.  We can imagine how their roots help them endure the cold, just as we find our underground ways of enduring the dark of the year.