From the time I was a child, I’ve played a how-could-you-tell game: if you’d just been plunked down here, without context, how could you figure out what season of the year it was? Now, for instance, how could you tell it’s fall?
Today, I could tell from the first glimpse of the out-of-doors, through the window at the top of the stairs, which looks out over the treetops. The particular trees you see from there are currently a mixture of summer’s green and autumn’s red. And that’s the easy answer, of course; just look at the colors of the trees. They’re well worth looking at.
My second sight of the outdoors, the back yard, has fewer clues. Our trees are mostly still green and holding on to their leaves. There’s one big giveaway, though. The white pines are losing needles. The pines aren’t suffering some disease. This is the way of pines. In the fall, about a third of the needles turn a soft yellow, fall off, and quickly turn a fawn brown, forming drifts of color at the bases of the trees and in the grass.
The view out front is less subtle. There are locust trees on the court, and their little leaves are the first to turn gold and fall. Ash leaves used to do the same things, but the emerald ash borer put paid to that by killing off the ash trees.
Once the dog and I leave the house for our walk, we catch what Tennyson called “the moist rich smell” of autumn. I call it nutty. Sometimes, it’s nuts that give rise to it. Acorns, shagbark hickory nuts, black walnuts, and horse chestnuts are already on the ground. But, as often as not, it’s ash leaves that smell so good. I’ve been known to reach down and crush a handful of them for a bigger hit of nuttiness. The smell is so good, it could be described as delicious.
Then there are the sounds of autumn. The swish of locust leaves as you walk through them and the little percussive snaps as they hit the pavement, the rasp as they dance along the street in a breath of wind. The crunch of larger leaves when you step on them, the crisp contact sound when you find one big enough to kick and send back into the air. The rustle of dry leaves still on the trees.
Fall does something to how you feel, too. Roads leading north assume a gravitational pull. If you go north, if you go Up North, you get to see the brighter colors sooner. No waiting necessary. Go now, the roads beckon; go now.
Don, invited to play the how-could-you-tell game, says, “The dew! It stays on the ground longer, so your feet are wet all day long, and it makes it hard to dry hay. And the corn. In the summer, you can smell and hear the corn growing. In the fall, the telltale sign is you see the ears falling.” They grow upright on the plant till autumn, when they gradually drop to a hanging position. “They’re about straight out now,” he says.
Wild ducks are another tipoff, Don says, and wood ducks are starting to migrate. “We passed a pond with about ninety of them on it. Wood ducks don’t like the cold. You can tell when it’s going to stay cold when the wood ducks are gone.” Duck season opens on the fourteenth, Don says, and he’s looking forward to it. He notices that the coats of deer and his horses are getting fuller and darker. And that nutty smell I like so much? He calls that, smelling the leaves changing. He and the friend with him when we talked identified sitting in hunting blinds while acorns, and especially the much-heavier black walnuts, crash into the ground around them as quintessentially autumn.
The temperature and humidity are more reasonable in the fall, hay notwithstanding. Even the second taste of summer we’ve enjoyed lately felt more comfortable than summer itself.
The seasonal tilt of the earth’s axis brings a different angle to the sun now. It’s lower in the sky, when the dog and I walk, low enough that shadows are long and the warmth feels gentle–companionable, rather than aggressive. It makes you want to quicken your steps. Hustle along. Tackle big projects. Leap tall buildings. School is in session. The students are back. It’s football season.
If you were plunked down in southeast Michigan now, without a lick of context, you could tell the season in a flash.
There’s excitement in the air. This the beginning. This is fall.
6 0ctober 2023