Week 2Fall Week 2
I told him that I chose botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together.
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Autumn light is the loveliest light there is. Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world a brightened dream. Dust motes catch fire, drifting down from the trees and rising from the stirred soil, floating over lawns and woodland paths and ordinary roofs and parking lots. It’s an unchoreographed aerial dance, a celebration of what happens when light marries earth and sky. Autumn light always makes me think of chalk dust settling in the expectant hush of an elementary school classroom during story time, just before the bell rings and sets the children free.
In fall, the nights are cooler and clearer, too, with the harvest moon floating steadfast in the night sky. Along the roadsides, in years when there’s been enough rain, flowers bloom in wild bouquets: asters and ironweed and white snakeroot and goldenrod, as high as my head—food for the monarchs and the painted ladies and the ruby-throated hummingbirds as they make their long migrations. Every kind of New World warbler is on the wing now, heading south like the raptors and the waterbirds, but they linger a while before moving on again, and for a time Tennessee is filled with exotic songs.
The flowers that bloom in autumn, like the beautyberries and hackberries and arrowwood berries, don’t deliberately signal the season of farewells. They are only blooming and ripening in their time, just as the birds and the butterflies are traveling in theirs, a perfect concatenation of abundance and need. But a lifetime of paying attention to what feeds my winged neighbors means I can’t help seeing these dust motes, and these long shadows at the end of shortening days, as an irrefutable sign: summer is ending. By the time of the equinox, summer has already gone.
There was a time when I didn’t feel sad about the coming of fall, perhaps because I grew up in Alabama, where the new season mostly means the end of unrelenting heat and oppressive humidity. There are plenty of warm, sunny days in an Alabama winter, and camellias bloom in profusion from November until the first blossoms of springtime arrive. That’s not true here in Tennessee, where temperatures dip much lower at least once or twice each winter.
But perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was younger is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead. In those days my only worry was that my real life, the one I would choose for myself and live on my own terms, was taking too long to arrive. Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.
And so I greet this season with a quiet and a stillness I never felt when I was younger. I used to laugh at the comical shabbiness of the bluebirds in molt, so fussy with one another as their new feathers come in. Now I know it won’t be long before these fledglings, whom I have known since their mother laid the eggs they emerged from, will be off in their gorgeous adult blues to search for their own territories.
An orb weaver who pitched her camp next to my outdoor faucet this summer is making her egg sacs now. She, too, will be gone by the time cold weather arrives, but unlike the hummingbirds, she will not be coming back. Her future lies in the perfect egg sacs strung together like pearls and hanging in the center of her elaborate web—six of them now, with more to come, I think.
The gift of the equinox, the day when there are as many hours of light as of darkness, is the gift of Janus, of looking ahead even as we look behind. The summer birds are flying south and soon the broadhead skink will be looking for a safe place to spend the winter. I will watch for her to wake next spring, just as I will watch for the warblers and the hummingbirds to return, just as I will watch for this summer’s seeds, carried on the winds of autumn and in the bellies of birds, to push up from the earth and bloom again.
And all winter I will keep watch over the spider’s egg sacs, hoping that one of her daughters chooses this quiet spot for her own web. It’s a good place to settle—damp and shady, a respite from the harsh light of summer.