Edging into fall’s chill and shifting colour palette

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/09/2023 (757 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most times, it’s tangential. It meets you cruelly on the unexpected oblique, taking every advantage of surprise.

You’re sitting in front of the house, the world unfolding the way it does, the wind loose in the fading, declining elms. (Perhaps you’re watching the thinning leaves with something close to dread, watching also for the arrival of the arborist’s terminal, orange spray-painted spot.) The two-way traffic of cars and walkers and bicyclists, scattered and uneven people taking in the summer heat, the ease of offhand conversation, the way they let private issues spill out into the public forum as they stroll.

Then something comes up the steps and sits right beside you.

Hello.

It is the three-note musical decline, the tumbler-shift of a combination lock deftly lining up, falling into place and opening, the click and shatter of memory where, suddenly, you hear a sentence in the voice of a parent who died long ago.

It is the season rightly known as fall, the one we’re about to pitch face-first into. And it is unavoidable.

Some people equate autumn with the arrival of school or the last summer long weekend of Labour Day. But it’s a finer, more discrete line than that — it’s not the all-at-once black marker line of “that was then and this is now,” not at all the way winter announces itself with the first blanket of snow.

Autumn is also a line that weighs enough, is three-dimensional enough, that you can really only think of it as an edge. An edge like you find on a sharpened axe or a filleting knife. Through an electron microscope, that edge would be fat and round and unwieldy, but against your skin, it trims the pale near-invisible hairs without pause and continues — unceasing — on its way. The closest of close shaves. You shiver at its passing. Garden plants wither at its touch.

The edge of autumn coming is caught in the tin smell of that particular rotting fall damp, in the quickness of the evening’s downward temperature shift, in the distinct change of the colour of the light. It’s not so much an arrival as it is a widening crack in the late summer at this point: there may be weeks of warmth yet, but even the rain has changed. The big-shouldered thunderstorms, built high of heavy humid air, seem unlikely now: fall rain comes from slate flat clouds, devoid of thunder’s majesty. Rain patters, unpassing. Steady. Almost endlessly. Sunlight is suddenly anemic.

The bright greens of plants have dulled to matte now, hope devolved into the matter-of-fact of practical and determined existence. The leaves on squash vines have curled and fallen back, their curtains roughly pulled, so the squash appear all at once, unforeseen like magic tricks. Tomatoes still clutching the vine perform their embarrassment.

Squirrels are diligently hiding so much food they will never be able to find it all. New oak trees depend on their largesse, or at least on their confusion.

It’s all around you, but for now, the season is most obvious on the shoulders of the day.

The later and later morning light, when you’re walking briskly though the nine-degree, seven-degree, four-degree cool of neighbourhoods, the houses resolute and impassive — lights out — the Canada geese, flying low, calling raucous warnings we simply don’t have the tools to understand.

The wasps are drinking fermenting grape juice on the vine, and end up staggering around the yard, too drunk to take wing but still as angry as the blunt math equation of a freshman dumped by a distant girlfriend precisely 12 days after the start of the term. It isn’t right — it just angrily is. A minus B equals suddenly stupid C.

There is so much more now to look forward to — so much to unroll and enjoy.

Sure, it’s the time of harvest and the sharply bevelled acorn squash. Of potatoes dug up from wet ground under dead and drying stalks, their buried treasure found in taut skins dappled with streaked mud. The time of stripping stiff green corn husks from the bright wet yellow-and-white beads of corn kernels. Onions, found nestled in the rounded origami of their dried-brown paper skins, are as deep and complicated as their many variegated layers.

An apple, just one apple, snatched from a feral ditch-bound tree, sharp and bright and particularly crisp, in itself the singular definition of all the apples that ever were and will ever be, but cut cleanly with the unique imprint of your teeth and only your teeth, the bruised flesh already gently browning even as the apple juice runs down.

It is also amazingly, achingly sad.

A definitive and obvious bookmark, tucked tight and purposefully between the pages, and one that’s always one year closer to the end of this particular book.

Russaell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at Russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca