From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

Sleeping, working, even playing is better in fall’s cooler weather. Summer is usually great with swimming and boating, picnics and reading on the deck, but this summer has been a scorcher! Hot and humid; I haven’t enjoyed our weedy lake or even my morning walks dripping in humidity. On my walk today I met another gal who grinned as she exclaimed “fall is almost here!” I think all but one of my pals is happy to be rid, or almost rid, of hot, humid weather when we sweat uncomfortably and have no energy…I LOVE FALL!  

Temperatures are in the 60s and 70s at night so I sleep so much better. Bees are buzzing in the garden sucking all the sweetness from the remaining flowers. Squirrels are busy gathering nuts in the yard; fireflies dance in the night sky. Hummingbirds have abandoned our feeders to begin their annual migration to winter in Mexico. Sumac is turning crimson, and the maple leaves are beginning to turn yellow, red and orange, or as my friend Barb says, fall’s maple leaves are colored chablis, merlot and burgundy.  

Fall is fast creeping into my world. Strange, but why it is that as each season approaches, we long for the past season to extend itself. Most years, there are never enough sunny summer days to lounge on the dock and enjoy those balmy nights of moonlight. What happened to the past year of my life? How I savor sunning on the dock hearing the lapping water beneath me and the loud chirping of crickets as I read on the screened porch. Can we ever have too much of such joyful abandonment? Summer and our youth are so fleeting. We want more…

Teachers are busy clipping pictures and making colorful letters for bulletin board displays. Lessons are being planned and first day of school outfits are being chosen. Sometimes I miss my school connections. My first year of teaching I taught junior high English just outside Chicago. It was the mid sixties, when desegregation began. In my first classroom were two memorable students: Johnny was a handsome karate expert with his own band, and grinning Brucie, a short Italian kid with a slicked back duck tail and mischievous eyes. He danced his way into my classroom and down the hall with his energetic “twist.” Johnny was the charming leader of the class, but he was 18 and couldn’t read. We formed a mutual admiration society: I helped him learn to read, and he controlled the classroom troublemakers. He made more money with his popular band than I did teaching English!

Fall marks many changes. Sumac growing along the highway is turning red. Bikers are riding the bike trails and boaters are pulling skiers, some in wet suits. Geraniums, purple phlox, red beebomb and black eyed susans are looking  tired in the garden. Yellow, bronze and purple mums are on display at groceries and flower shops. It’s time to find the down quilts for sleeping and sweatshirts for brisk, early morning walks. The seasons are changing; temperatures are falling, and the foliage is fading. Darkness descends shortly after supper time.  

September is casserole time: a hamburger-mushroom soup casserole for supper topped off with a dessert of apple crisp or a peach cobbler now that those luscious Colorado peaches have arrived. Familiar smells wafting through the air of roast beef, baking potatoes, onions and carrots coming from the oven wrap me in comforting memories of my mother’s meals. Familiar odors can fuel the fastest kind of time travel speeding me back through the years.    

It’s time to get out Mom’s recipe for canning sweet bread and butter pickles and peaches, make chokecherry jam. Storm windows can wait a bit, but I’d better get the furnace checked. 

Fall is a rather sad, melancholic time of year. September means the start of school and when October arrives we anticipate the arrival of snowflakes and freezing temperatures, the winter of our lives. We want more warm days and night before those of us in old houses put up storm windows and get out the quilts. Some of us aren’t content with the calendar’s pages turning to a new season. Many of us protest growing another year older as well as the changing season. Why can’t time stand still?

Whether we want it or not, it’s time for the fall equinox, which falls between September 20 and 22. The hours of daylight and night are equal, 12 hours each. September also marks the “Wine Moon,” the lunar cycle when grapes are harvested from the arbors, pressed and put away to become wine. The full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox is known as the “Harvest Moon” since farmers would harvest their crops during the night with the light of a full moon.  

Summer will soon be a past memory.  Enjoy these remaining days of August’s sunshine and warmth. 

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”  ~Albert Camus, French author/philosopher’s comment on living life in the present.  

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.