Autumn

Perhaps because I am now home during the day, because I have time to watch the skies and the trees, because I have moments to reflect, I am enjoying this autumn more than ever.  The changing of colors is not nearly as dramatic as in other parts of the country, nor does it last as long, but it is desert beautiful.

In past years, I was so busy with long hours in the classroom, it felt like I only snatched brief moments of the beauty of autumn.   I watched the clouds creep over the mountains on my drive to work, noted the changing colors of the leaves and the lake as I drove home near sunset, heard a flock of geese honking as they passed overhead, spent a few crisp Friday afternoons announcing the home football games, raked up fallen leaves on the weekend, and lamented with others that the days were getting shorter. 

Without realizing it, I probably more closely related other things to the fall season.  How about diving into Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Poe’s “The Black Cat,” “Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Raven,” Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the adventures of  mountain men like John Charles Fremont as they opened the West, grammar lessons, and creatively using the changing seasons to craft memorable similes and metaphors in writing? Oh yes, and add to that the rehearsals for the November Dinner-Theatre production.  Those images, ideas, themes, and activities shaped my autumn days for many years.

Perhaps today I better understand the ideas and emotions which guided these authors to say the following: 

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
Emily Bronte

The autumn wind is a pirate. Blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along swaggering boisterously. His face is weather beaten, he wears a hooded sash with a silver hat about his head... The autumn wind is a Raider, pillaging just for fun.
Steve Sabol