November 9, 2012

Another very lovely fall morning, clear and bright and just cool enough to make you feel like it's not still summer.  Trees get more brown by the day, and overhead we have the pale vivid blue, cloudless and delicate as a glass bowl.  Earlier before I left for school, the cardinals were out, and several mockingbirds as well.  Since yesterday I saw no birds I was glad to see some this morning, arriving with the first early signs of dawn, pearl blue sky and a freshening breeze.   Now nothing much out there, save the striped cat on his usual perambulation of the territory, and the occasional car or truck turning the corner, sun flashing off glass and chrome.  Now at nearly noon, the sun has moved around until the lower half of the trees are in shade and the top half blaze with clear light.  The maple ia getting that dusty yellow color it achieves before the last half of the leaves really start to turn.

For this morning a longer poem by Edward Hirsch who used to teach at the University of Houston.  It seem appropriate to talk of fall and maples . .

Fall   

Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season

Changes its tense in the long-haired maples

That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves

Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition

With the final remaining cardinals) and then

Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last

Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.

At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees

In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager

And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever

Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun

Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,

A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud

Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything

Changes and moves in the split second between summer's

Sprawling past and winter's hard revision, one moment

Pulling out of the station according to schedule,

Another moment arriving on the next platform. It

Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away

From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,

Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving

Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,

Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.

And every year there is a brief, startling moment

When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and

Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless

Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:

It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;

It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

Edward Hirsch

The changing light of fall falling on us . . . this is the season when I notice the light more than any other season and I'm not quite sure why that is.  I try to pay attention to light for it fascinates me, but the fall seems to bring so many changes of light and so quickly that you almost can't help notice it.   How it stays dark later and later, and gets dark earlier and earlier, until we go back to standard time then all of a sudden in a great leap back the mornings gain a little light that the evenings lose.  I love the image of summer's sprawling past . . . here it sprawls for an inordinate amount of time, and winter's hard revision, it does make you see things again in that there is more light here, the leaves finish their vanishing and then there is more light everywhere.  And the odor of burning, abated somewhat today, does mark the fall, whether from fires intentional or accidental, this seems to be an ordinary time for them.  Though the hard pale blue of the sky arcs overheard, I can feel that fall has started its long descent and will truly arrive some morning with a dusting of frost and a great letting go of leaves, a doorway to our short soft winter.

Have a great weekend, enjoy the fall!