A Blog of Personal Thoughts

Autumn! Season Changes

September 2024

Autumn! The season changes, which I like a lot. September has arrived. When I was a child living in New England, it meant cooler weather and the colors of the world changed as maple trees blazed their various shades of red and orange. Oak leaves turned a dark red. The leaves of the copper beech tree, my favorite climbing tree at my childhood home, were a dark red in the summer, which contrasted with the green leaves of other trees. Come fall its leaves contrasted with the maple and oak trees to become a copper color.

My tree, because I used to climb to the top of it with a book, towered over our four-story house, the fourth story being the attic where anyone could stand tall. From the very top of the copper beech tree, I could look over the roof of the house to the valley below. Read then dream. Dream then return to the pages of my book. Read more. My tree was probably 80 feet tall.

My favorite season is a fight between autumn and winter. I like cool and cold weather. For now, as summer ends, we harvest the rest of the garden. The smell of the land changes as I step outside or go for a walk around my place in Alaska or into the next-door national park. It’s the chill in the air, the decay of vegetation at the beginning of its decay and composting for winter. As we harvest the chard, beets, carrots, and pick more flowers for the house, I see the rich moist soil, dig my hands into it just for the pleasure of its feel. Then I smell that earthiness on my fingertips.

I love living in the natural world far from cities, concrete, and noise. I like the walks in the changing colors and mottled trees and bushes. When we walk in the part, we check the stream, ditched alongside the road to drain the muskeg for the roadbed. Today there are no spawning cohos or humpies yet. Perhaps they’ll be there in another week. Fall is here and it’s time for them to lay their thousands of eggs for the spring hatching. Only a small portion will hatch, perhaps a tenth of the eggs. The rest will not be fertilized, eaten by prey, or not make it for other reasons.

A stream that flows through Glacier Bay National Park, still empty of fall’s spawning salmon. I’ll keep looking every day.

I walk along the Park road. I hear nothing. No one is at the end of Tower Road practicing firing for moose season that starts soon in two weeks. No cars drive by. No bears amble about the woods. I am alone in the silence of autumn. I see and hear few birds. Today. The sandhill cranes have not yet arrived on their migration south, but they’ll be here any day now. The magpies will come shortly for their winter stay and trumpeter swans arrive next month. When we had dogs, the magpies hung out here stealing dogfood. Looking at them from two feet away, their shimmering green, black, and blue feathers mesmerized me. I love their raucous chatter. I know autumn is here when the cranes pass through, the magpies arrive for winter, and colors change.

I may miss the colors of New England and Nova Scotia, but I know I’ve seen them and that they’ll still be there when I go back. Next fall I’ll go to Nova Scotia. Here, I have the colors of cottonwoods, yellow.

A changing Cottonwood tree.

When I was a child living in Maine, spring always meant mud season—walking to school through a field with mud pockets. I stepped out of a boot once. What was I to do? Take off my one muddy sock and put my boot back on? Take off my sock and let the rest of the muddy patch squeeze through my toes? I don’t recollect what decision I made. I just remember the quandary. Also, important people in my life seemed to die in the spring. Blossoming trees and flowers did nothing to assuage me.

Summer was worse. Although I loved to climb trees, it also meant hot days. One day The Boston Globe had a front-page picture of an egg being fried on a Boston sidewalk, whose temperature was 128 degrees Fahrenheit. No place was cool. The attic was out of the question even though the wasps were always asleep. Peggy and I could tease them, but they were not to be roused. No, summer was too hot even outside on our bike rides and picnic lunches. Anything over 75 or 80 F is simply too hot for me. My brother and his wife loved their winters in Mexico, but never managed to talk anyone of his three sisters to visit them there. Ocean yes, but no heat please.  

No, autumn is my time to guarantee I can go out whenever I wish, be it 60 or in winter’s minus zero Fahrenheit. Autumn signals winter is coming.

Here in Southeast Alaska, summer is pleasurable. Temperatures in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Nights are all predictable at 48. Visitors come in summer. This summer was no exception—two friends for a week each in June, two cousins for almost a week in August. Finally, our son and two friends came for a bit of fishing, stopped to borrow a gaff hook, and spent the night before a breakfast of garden kale, bacon, tomatoes, and eggs, coffee for all of them, tea for me.

Seth’s boat, Huck Finn, as he and his friends, the last of our summer’s guests , leave for the four-hour trip to Juneau.

Labor Day arrives and as my friend, Barb Mahoney always said, winter starts the day after Labor Day when all the tourists leave. It ends Memorial Day weekend when they come back. Between now and then, I can get lots of writing done and a couple trips Outside to give presentations about human behavior through the eyes of Precision Teaching and Behavior Analysis and readings I give at Fisher Poets Gathering.