On Sept. 23, fall arrives 'like the crackling of resinous wood': Column
As I write this, I know fall will officially arrive on Sept. 23 at 2:50 a.m. I also know I can’t predict how that first day of autumn will feel.
I did keep notes when it rolled into town last September. Here they are, their rough edges removed:
It felt chilly that first autumn morning. It felt dark, dank, enshrouded in fog. Forty-eight read the mercury column encased in a glass tube outside the window. Fifty-eight in the bedroom, where we’d turned off the heat for the summer. Cotton sheets felt like ice sheets, with chilly feet trapped in between.
We slid feet into fleece. Fall felt good in a warm pair of slippers. Then I padded toward the kindling pile, stacked in the mud room; grabbed a few chunks of split pine, just right for dispelling a chill. Fall looked like flames through the door of the wood stove. It sounded like the crackling of resinous wood. It sounded warm.
With lava-like speed, valley fog crept uphill. It crept from the river, where, last night, it formed at a line where cold air settled down on a thread of warm water. That thread was the river, bone dry, rocks exposed. Autumn felt parched on the banks of the fair Susquehanna.
Like a tired old man getting out a chair, the sun lifted itself from flatlands and crept up my hillside. From a lone source of brightness, an infinite number of flashlight beams streaked through the fog. At the tips of wet leaves, the sun’s rays infused droplets with sparkle.
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Tops of trees glowed with a bright golden light as the first sunlight reached their leaves. Autumn began feeling warm, feeling crisp, feeling short-sleeved, not buried in wool.
It tasted from the get-go like cider and doughnuts; like apples that crunch; like the last berry pie of the season. It tasted like the reddest and juiciest sun-ripe tomato.
It still tasted like corn on the cob.
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What did it sound like? You know the sounds: crowds at football games cheering; the first scraping of rake times on earth as they gathered up leaves. The first day of fall sounded like geese on the wing, like a northwest wind snapping at flags.
It sounded like the drone of a distant chain saw; like a clanking of tractors and choppers in fields, as they moved along rigidly straight rows of stalks, mowing down ranks of corn soldiers.
Autumn sounded like the school bus that climbs up my hill, giant yellow transporter of scholars. It swirled like a broad-winged hawk, kiting on thermals. It looked like the orange on butterfly wings, as a monarch flew south, solar-powered, the sun on its back.
I watched as that monarch winged steadily past, feeling this ground was my place, needing badly to walk in the woods watching green turn to gold. The first day of autumn felt good, very good. My fleece vest began calling. I could feel flannel sheets in my future.
E-mail Rick at rmarsi@stny.rr.com
This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Ready for cider and doughnuts, crackling fires, slippers? Fall is here
