“I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”
I was standing with my neighbors beneath a tree, chatting about the beauty of a 1950 Hudson Super 8, listening to the cries of delight from the children at a backyard birthday party and watching a woodpecker work on a fat branch. On the ground near us, small swarms of house sparrows pecked at the leaves and grasses and I watched a yellow leaf make a lazy descent from the mother branch. I mused as it fell, then panicked, and wanted to run beneath the leaf and blow it back into the tree, screaming, “DON’T FALL!”
When I moved from the San Joaquin Valley region of California to Southern Indiana, some friends invited me to go skiing at the newly opened Paoli Peaks. “Skiing?” I asked. “Does that not involve two things I hate: snow and cold? Who does that on purpose?” People who visited me in California would ask if I missed “the seasons.” I told them if one of the seasons was “the cold season,” then I was happy to be warm all year. When the leaves start to fall from the trees, I know that snow is in the offing, and that makes me unhappy.
I do not have an air-conditioned car, and one window unit cools my apartment. Though we have had fewer 90 degree days this past summer than 2013, it still gets hot beneath the roof over my bed. But I manage to stay cool by intoning, “It could be winter. It could be winter.” One of our correspondents, Peter Kuhns, takes a measure of pride in bundling up for a walk in sub-zero conditions. I too, enjoy a stroll. In the grocery store recently, I got a cheerful acknowledgement from a neighbor I had never seen off her porch. Our usual routine was to wave a “good morning” greeting to each other as I passed on my walk to the store for my morning paper. But the colder the day, the smaller my leather footprint and the greater my carbon footprint. I can never put on enough clothes to stay warm on a winter walk, and the few times I tried to do so, I stomped into my destination on dead feet, with snot strings wrapped around my mummified head.
When we were children in Pittsburgh Penn., my brother and I shoveled about 48 miles of snow for $2 and a bag of candy. My frostbitten fingers still blanch at the first hint of cold. My two youngest children loved Karen Gundersheimer’s book, “Happy Winter,” and the opening poetics are still embedded in me: “Happy winter, rise and shine/ I love the early morning time/ My sister snuggles close to me – Two bugs in a rug we laugh and see/ How frosty patterns look like lace/ Each window has its special face…” I never once, when they were young, told them how painful the reading of that book was.
The fall of leaves from the trees create moments of great beauty, and as an artist, I cannot help but to revel in the sight. But when I have finished sighing at the glory of fall, I am caught up short by impending arrival of its meaner brother, that hoary old man with frozen robes and an icicle beard.
Johnny Mercer’s English translation of Jacques Prévert’s lyrics to the song “Autumn Leaves” speaks of missing a darling when the leaves start to fall. I understand the melancholy, the feeling of loss, but for me, the darling I miss is summer.