"As Summer into Autumn slips..."
Two mornings ago, the light was electric. The ring of trees in our back yard cupped the sun’s rays and held them. Only weeks earlier the daylight seemed to seep through the tangled arms of leaves from above, and was warmer in hue than what I observed this week: now it’s an incandescent bulb dimming to fluorescent.
The light is more slant at this time of year as the North Pole rotates away from the sun. Perhaps that’s why my backyard resembled an illuminated vessel a few days ago, because the angled daylight bounced around inside it. But the slope of the sun increases in small increments starting at the summer solstice. Why is it so notable now?
Perhaps it’s all the other signs of change. The light of mid-September goes with the smells of the leaves that are turning and starting to drop. The terrace is covered already with yellow ovals from the locust boughs overhead, landing daily like confetti, but not yet peppered by the five-pointed husks from the maples that dominate. Other things that I can’t precisely distinguish as smells are surely mixed there. Goldenrod, so abundant and vibrant right now, along with Japanese knotweed in all its white frillery. And maybe even other scents, so integral to the time of year that they are indecipherable from the high notes of leaves and wood—bat guano perhaps, decaying squash and tomato vines, or amaranth seeds dried on their stalks along with burst milkweed pods—all wrapped inside the dank minerality that drifts on the ground fog of September.
The experience of seasonal change is nothing if not a layering. Layers that include conscious memories of autumns past, but more deeply, sense experience, that is, traces, reactions to sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feels that have structured over time an “autumness” to them. We can be unaware of them, and still they elicit our feelings.
Though I have spent the past twenty years living and working in New York City—a place that is arguably ignorant of nature—my first seventeen years were spent in a tiny rural town three hours northwest of where I am now. There, my brother and I spent every afternoon and weekend outside, mostly regardless of weather. We not only played in our big yard, we roamed the fields and forests nearby for miles. We were usually the only kids around. We had time to notice things: stones on the forest floor that turned out to be arrowheads, wild grapes hanging from vines inextricably twined on rusted barbed wire, or annual downed bird’s nests with hatchlings inside. We banked our memories with not only the pine cones, berries and animal bones discovered—the material things that we collected and used to tell ourselves stories about the land—but also the qualities of light and smell, sound and touch that surrounded us daily. Autumn was always a ripe time for laying down sensory memory.
Convention has it that autumn is a winding down, a prelude to winter, a move toward “sleep” or a “hibernation” of consciousness. When this seasonal light finally hits me, however, I feel at once a reverence and a renewed sense of being awake, always with a surge in energy and purpose.
There’s a theory that our memory is anchored in seasonality, and recently there is evidence that our brains do work differently from one season to another—possibly a way of compensating for the changes in light, humidity and other atmospheric fluctuations that might affect it.
Emily Dickinson’s “As Summer into Autumn slips” is a poem as much about our lament of time moving forward and all that that means to mortals as it is a poem about hanging on to the last scraps of summer as the September light changes.
While autumn marks an end to summer—in a beautiful way—it also marks beginnings. Beginnings of my garlic, rhubarb and asparagus plants for next year. Beginnings of cool season greens like spinach, kale, and sorrel that will take us through Thanksgiving week. Beginnings of longer walks outdoors than during the humid days of August.
As George Eliot put it in her correspondence once, “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
Delicious, indeed.
