Already there is a red-leafed maple tree. Some of the swamp maples behind our house are turning their canopies into that funky shade of brown and yellow. Some high hills are showing shades of red.
Our short summers even in the best of years are only one hundred days wire-to-wire. One frost ends and it seems we wake up a day later and the next frost is here.
I try every year to grow eggplant. We start them as early as is possible in cold frames; I weed and lay down compost and nurture the plants along; I get a beautiful purple blossom. And then, wham. A killing frost lays itself down in my garden. No eggplant.
After that first frost in fall the sun stops coming and then the leaves change their colors and drop to the ground.
Although I usually don’t notice the change of season until too late, I have noticed this early August the sun does not climb so high in the sky. The mornings are darker longer; sunlight is softer and the sharpness of the heat of the hottest days is dulled a bit. Evenings come sooner, which is a big loss. The long summer nights are perishable and going.
Pretty soon the woods will be gray and the ground covered with a thick mat of organic fodder. The lawn will brown up and die. The air will smell not of hay fever and dust but of wood smoke and rotting leaves.
The coming of fall is predictable to a degree and mostly the same each year. The differences are in the details – the pace of the foliage and its brightness, the times of the last blooms. Seasons matter here – they are sharply different. They give a good tool to measure time. They provide ready analogies to life. They give us stuff to do.
What I now need to do is get the wood in and pre-buy my heating oil, pay attention to the eggplant and be prepared to cover them, and make sure to savor hikes in our forests while the canopy remains mostly green.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio
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