The New Old Fall

Squibs and Blurbs

by Jerry Zimmerman

“In Heaven, it is always Autumn.”—John Donne

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—11/14/11—I looked up from my book, sensing that a new presence had entered my house.

I glanced around my darkened living room and all seemed normal. I continued to search from my perch on the couch, looking through my entrance hall and into my dining room, a room mostly taken up by a large wooden table and eight antique dining chairs.

Aha! There she was, the intruder in my home.

It was Autumn.

Autumn had come to visit through my opened drapes, with long, gentle fingers of creamy light, light that was round and golden, light so luscious and heavy that it draped itself upon my furniture with a palpable weight: a regal robe of sunlight thrown over familiar armchairs.

Autumn had announced her arrival on honeyed rays of light—how could anything so soft and quiet speak with such command? I was surprised and delighted to realize that She was finally here in full force.

Autumn has always been my favorite season and I always await her arrival with unhurried pleasure. There seems to be no need for haste and unnecessary movement at this time of year—people and actions and objects all seem to get organically heavier and all slow down accordingly.

We all understand that the sun hits the earth at a new and lower angle now and that the temperature goes up and down like a yo-yo, but science can’t explain the new rhythm we feel in our bones, the calmer thoughts that don’t race but, rather, amble through our minds. Fall is like the tide and the full moon: it changes everything.

I’m in love with this heaven of a season. One sniff outside and my body is filled with the earthy scent of life on this planet. Walking is a journey of musical crinkling and crackling on a bed of crisp leaf-bodies, laid out like a welcoming carpet. The sky is the sky-blue I dream about, and the trees are so happy to see me that they celebrate with greetings of fragile confetti in colors that soothe my soul.

This autumnal time conspires to comfort me and give me hope for all things. Yet, how strange to feel so good at a time that is filled with endings and death. Autumn seems so different from her other three sisters: Spring, Summer and Winter all contain within them the growing seed of the following season; Autumn’s arrival is already filled with her demise.

This is the season of endings: flowers wither and die, trees turn into emaciated skeletons, animals scurry and hide, birds fly the coop and we humans batten down to shelter from the storms. Autumn is direct and clear—everything must change; everything must end; everything must die. This is our world, our life.

The exquisite beauty and pleasures of Autumn and her coexisting grim message of mortality is a conflicting mystery, a confusing paradox. Yet, for me, She brings the deeper gift of understanding with her enticements and her woes.

Walking down the sidewalk in early November, the light is fabulous, reflective and refractive, glowing with an inner energy, yet these low sun rays would lack their richness without the deep shadows gliding under my feet and the dark pools of browns and blacks under each tree.

The soughing, snapping and lowing sounds of trees and leaves and gusty winds would not be so damn mesmerizing if not for the unexpected and haunting moments of utter quiet left in their wake.

And the air on my skin! Autumn is filled with summer’s heat and winter’s chill until those truly magic moments of skin-temperature-weather that make me feel freed from my body, floating in an ionosphere of weightless joy.

It seems Autumn has come again to give me the same lesson—again. Yin and Yang, good and bad, life and death, chocolate and vanilla, thought and no-thought, leaves and no leaves.

I’m happy with this reminder. I’m happy simply to be here in the warm sunshine, standing on my front lawn and looking at my neighbor’s tree, as I do at exactly this time every year.

It is an amazing ball of fiery orange-yellow.

It is Autumn.