Cinderella season

Fall is here, and will be gone before I embrace it if I hesitate at all. The most ephemeral and the most lovely of seasons has always been my favorite. It's the time when the trees finally come into their own. After serving as a foil for the flowers of spring and summer they are for a brief time on center stage. Like Cinderella, they magically shed their common garb for the jewel tones of topaz and amber.

As I ran my usual errands the other day I felt as if I had stepped into a picture postcard. The drab little town where I do my grocery shopping had disappeared. In its place was a scene from a Robert Frost poem or a Maxfield Parrish painting. The Revolutionary War era churchyard lay under a blanket of brightly stained leaves, guarded by towering red maples. Over them all was the spire of a clapboard Colonial church, bright white against a blue sky that looked like a Della Robbia creation.

My daily walk up a dirt road overhung by maples and birch resembled nothing so much as a pointilist painting, tiny dots of color in great drifts along the side of the road. The slightest breeze would shake loose a flurry of yellow leaves which drifted litingly toward the ground, dancing to the unheard music of some autumnal symphony, a lovely prelude to the snowstorms to come. Sometimes a whisper of a breeze would dislodge only one or two which would pirouette gracefully to the earth, like dancers who had the stage to themselves for a fleeting moment.

Tourists flock to New England for these two weeks, but I think those of us who live here year round are even more amazed by the transformation the familiar landscape undergoes. For eleven months of the year we live amid the stark grays of November and December, the cold white of January and February, the muddy browns of March and April, the yellowy green of May and June, and the deep emerald of July, August and September. Every year October is a surprise. It is impossible to remember the brilliance of these short weeks.

It is also impossible to capture the scent of autumn, the deep, loamy perfume that belongs only to this place and this time. It is a mixture of the sweetness of pine, the musty smell of wet leaves, the spicy scent of moss. If it were possible to bottle this smell I would spray it on my pillow everynight, bury my face in it and dream of yellow woods and sapphire skies. It is as distinctive as the landscape but far more evocative than a photograph.

There are places on earth where it is always summer, and places where it is always winter. But nowhere is there eternal fall. It is by necessity fleeting, floating, evanescent, transitory. As the transition from summer to winter, the dying passage, it cannot last. It is a time to seize the day or to rue the lost opportunity.