What is Fall for?

Fall is the downslope on the rollercoaster, an annual reminder of the many cycles in which we spend our lives. Whether it is the body, the garden, the intellect, the house, the dog or the marriage, we live in cycles, sometimes circles.

Now it is late fall, truly drawing the line, winter is coming. The garden and the wild-world talk to us all year about cycles and seasons. Harvest is now, though some of the soft and sweet things have come and gone. Our salads are sturdier, with more bitter flavors and more substance in the leaves. We take the last brilliant dahlia or rose, really seeing it, now that its abundant sisters have turned frowsy and gone on their way. Berries are done but sturdy swollen fruits sustain us. Apples show off their amazing variety and fall, ungathered, in our world of plenty; fat pears ripen off the tree, waiting to fill our mouths with juice. Huge pumpkins and squashes, striped and pink and pale teal blue lay in heaps at markets and try to remind us that for some, sometimes, they were all that sustained a family in the cold and hard places.
We are drawn into the decline of vigor, the lifeforce either going to seeds or underground in roots to wait for the turning of the wheel. The gardener, attempting to rule the realm, gets to judge: “Off with it’s head! Where’s the scrub brush and the rake? Ah, let’s just let it spread…” Everywhere there is a confetti of leaves, luminous, almost iridescent, dancing, shaking, floating and showing their inner selves: “You may have thought we were green, or purple, or yellow when we clothed ourselves in chlorophyll and wore our make-up, but now you see the colors we always were and you only get a glimpse.”

True decay appears: mold and rot, and desiccated sticks. We want to avert our eyes but we would miss the mushrooms in their bold and erotic shapes, and the patterns of leaves on leaves, the reaching and naked branches, still holding a nest from spring, and the great flakes and curls of red-brown madrona bark peeled away from the yellow-green sinewy branches and trunks. There is glory in the ending of things.
Black nights help us see the moon again, the great disc of silver light, rising up so much bigger than we remember. The light plays with our imaginations, leads us back to stories and hopes and magic wishes. It seems almost as if it could take us up and absorb us, but we turn and go back in the house for the balm of warmth and lamps. So, we slip back and forth over the mysterious, transistioning nature of fall, regretting ease gone by, thrilling to current beauties and storms, a little fearful of winter to come.

And so it is in our own lives. For myself, some seasons have come and gone: germination and fast growth, youth and buoyant vigor with its confusions and turmoil; middle-age with its striving, power and prosperity interspersed with its crises, criticism, reckoning and mourning; then, ah! fall, even late fall. I can perhaps hold my gains of self-knowledge, possessions, and friendships, but relax, let my leaves turn and fall, feel the invigorating sharp chill, roll in the lushness of harvest, love, and joy abounding. Winter, in its turn, can come now.