November 19, 1999

"But I miss you most of all . . . When Autumn Leaves start to fall."

Every year sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving, when we in Solano finally get our minimum autumn requirement, I pull out the sheet music to "Autumn Leaves" and get misty while playing that most evocative song of the season. It is now when I miss my native Michigan the most.

Sure, I've got a few liquid ambers in the back yard whose leaves take on a respectable shade of red, but you'll never settle for that if you've spent any time in childhood walking under a canopy of dinner plate-sized crimson maple leaves. On the way to school we'd gather bouquets of them and every year the teacher would bring in an old iron for us to fuse the waxed paper that enveloped our best finds. If you squinted your eyes, they looked a little bit like stained glass hanging in the school windows.

Being a girl, there was always a clothing component to everything, and I loved sweater weather. Around here you're lucky to have six weeks when garments made of wool can be tolerated, but in the Midwest, schoolgirls of my era could hardly wait to put on woolen heather-tone sweaters, A-line skirts or optional Bermuda shorts, and matching kneesocks. If local girls wore such outfits to class in a typical October they'd probably be liquefied by lunch.

And the very concept of "crisp" can only be grasped completely as you chomp into a McIntosh apple after a brisk walk in the country. Then there were visits to friends' farms for barn dances, hayrides, and being treated to a sample at the cider house. All was not abundance, though, because under every fallen leaf were the dark beginnings of the decomposition necessary to feed the next spring's cycle of rebirth.

But even here where our autumns are so fleeting, the process of decay produces some immediate gratifications: trees are denuded into silhouettes suspended in the moody stillness of their time of rest. Surely it is on such contemplative days that philosophers and artists are born, not as they're being assaulted with constant telecommunications overload. So while it's here, break away from the electronic screens and the inescapable noise of our technological world to take a quiet look around and enjoy the fall. It's not up to Michigan standards, but we won't have to shovel anything out of our driveways when winter comes.

© 1999 Cynthia Hahn