On the television news this week, one of the reporters made an off-the-cuff remark about the beginning of fall, “every Michigander’s favorite season.” Could that possibly be true? It’s true for my sweetheart and me, and for the friends and relations I’ve been asking. Fall in Michigan is, after all, pretty great.
For a highly scientific base of comparison, I asked our visiting North Carolinians—Daughter Number Three and husband—if they had a favorite season of the year. Each of them had the same first response: “Well, not winter.” They particularly objected to snow. D#3 went a step further, saying it was no accident that their house holds no images of snow. “I don’t even want to see snow on the walls.”
D#3’s husband also eliminated summer as a favorite. “Summer’s pretty oppressive,” he said. In their part of the world, he said, most people would identify fall or spring as their top season, “fall because it’s beautiful, and spring for rebirth.” In the end, D#3 didn’t specify a season, but her husband chose fall.
Fall smells delicious. As you wend your way through woods and past ponds, the scents present themselves to your nose. My favorite is a nutty one, often but not exclusively found near locust trees, and as fragrant as baked goods coming out of the oven. If only there were a recipe for something with the texture of brownies and the taste of that autumn smell!
Sue identifies a different smell as quintessential autumn. For her, it’s the smell of goldenrod, spicy and sweet. On-line sources make disparaging remarks about goldenrod smelling like old gym socks. If that’s true of the goldenrod in other places, that’s a shame. The goldenrod here smells spicy and sweet. It looks fabulous, too.
As season succeeds season, Mary and her son Isaac have been watching another type of succession at their house, that of caterpillar to chrysalis to monarch. They’ve been growing milkweed for four years now, supporting hungry caterpillars and keeping an eye out for chrysalises. This year so far, they’ve spotted ten chrysalises hanging from the front of their house, and each of them yielded a butterfly.
Nine produced healthy monarchs. One, alas, did not. Mary said that, when that butterfly emerged, its wings were deformed, and it died shortly thereafter. Isaac said that the problem was a parasite, and Isaac knows about these things. Still, nine new butterflies is a wonder and, yes, Mary has baby pictures.
Another event in the natural cycle of things took place last week, a lunar eclipse. My husband and I knew it was coming, but we hadn’t talked about it and it had slipped our minds. Then Dave Rexroth mentioned it during the weather report. I was upstairs and my sweetheart was downstairs; we met in the front hall as we both dashed for the door and went outside to watch.
An eclipse, even a partial lunar eclipse, is an exciting event. We thoroughly enjoyed it. Standing together in the darkness, we could sense neighbors around the court watching it, too. A congregational blessing for persons baptized into the Episcopal church asks that God grant them “the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”
As my husband and I dashed together to the eclipse, I thought, a la Paul Simon, still joyful after all these years. Still wonderin’ after all these years. I’m deeply grateful that we are, in this way, so well matched.
Sue and I saw something more in line with Simon’s actual lyrics, this morning. We were walking downhill past the Cascades and became aware of a staffer from the canoe livery that’s just upriver of the Cascades looking for something in the water. Another staffer further downriver was doing the same thing, as was a third, still further down the Cascades.
We asked the first one what they were looking for. She said, “Oh, we had a school group go through here just now, and we’re making sure they all made it.”
Just then, we saw a two-person kayak paddling upstream through a pool between chutes, the kayakers wearing extravagant, matching hats. Upstream after them came a one-person kayak, its paddler sporting a different but equally distinctive hat. His was a horned helmet of the sort generally attributed to Vikings. The first kayakers turned their heads, revealing the skull and crossbones on their hats. Pirates and Vikings. Of course?
“They’re from Community High,” the staffer said, Community being Ann Arbor’s wildly popular alternative high school, now in its fifty-third year. That comment made all clear. The kids at Community are still crazy after all these years.
27 September 2024