Autumn is a season of remembering

Opinion

I am walking by a river on a perfect day.

The water is gurgling its contentment at being warmed by the October sun. It glistens like diamonds where it is touched by the dappled light coming through the trees.

Many of the sugar maples are still heavily laden with keys — the seedpods not quite ready to leave the security of the mother tree for their solo flights. I have read that samaras — those pods shaped like winged creatures — can be borne by the wind for many metres before landing on the ground and becoming embedded in the soil to strike out on their own.

Most of the trees are still supple and green, but here and there are swatches of crimson, yellow, orange, burgundy, deep purple.

There are flashes of blue plumage as jays flit through the leaves, screaming at each other, bouncing from bough to slender bough and making them tremble, their bright black eyes always watching.

Up around the bend two brown ducks are napping on rocks in a shallow spot, their orange feet visible but with beaks tucked into their wings.

At the convergence of three willow trees, I nestle in the crook of the ancient textured bark to watch the water, the shrubbery at the river’s edge so enamoured of itself it reaches towards the mirrored surface.

A dogberry tree holds its bunches of vermilion berries aloft like bouquets. I hear the crisp click-click-click of dogs’ claws and the soft creak of wood as they walk past on the boardwalk.

Just ahead of me, a low maple branch hangs like a 1970s swag curtain over the water, nature’s adornment.

As Emily Brontë wrote, “Every leaf speaks bliss to me / Fluttering from the autumn tree.”

Fall is my favourite season, days like this when the warmth of the sun on your skin is a gift that you know cannot last; the trees beginning to shed their leaves but still alive with rustlings and birdsong. Above, a soft bank of wispy clouds drifts in front of the sun, whose halo is all pastel pinks and yellows.

Autumn is the season I most associate with my father. He loved to be in nature at every opportunity — walking through the woods, fishing for trout, chewing on frankum (a knob of sap that he’d pry off a spruce tree with his pocket knife) — stumbling upon a few late-season partridgeberries, the tiny fruits bright like blood-red garnets among the scraggy moss.

I thought of him the other evening, taking a turn around Quidi Vidi Lake with our daughter, when I saw a man kneeling on the ground on the bank above us, eating blueberries off the bush.

“Gift from God!” he said, happily.

My father would have agreed. I like to imagine him as he was in the fullness of his life, presiding over an autumnal Anglican service in his white surplice. In those days people would bring some of their fall bounty to decorate the church. Sitting there in a reverie, with candlelight warming the lemon-polished wood, I enjoyed seeing the fruits of the harvest — cabbages and beets, turnips, potatoes and carrots, dried saltfish and bottled moose, the windowsills lined with glowing jars of pickles, jams and jellies, giving off the kind of rapturous light that artist Mary Pratt would later preserve in her painting, Jelly Shelf.

I can hear Dad’s clear, steady voice leading the hymns, then offering a final benediction before we all filed out into the clear, crisp night, the sky a multitude of glinting stars.

When nights turned colder and wood smoke scented the air, us children would be keen with anticipation for Bonfire Night — the Nov. 5 celebration of the failure of the 1605 Guy Fawkes plot in Britain. My older brother and his friends would spend hours piling fallen trees, old pallets and anything else half-combustible into a pyramid. No one talked too much about the religious and political origins of Guy Fawkes Night — they just enjoyed watching things burn and roasting things over the fire.

Deemed too young, I was bitterly disappointed at being made to stay home when the big night came. But after dark my father led me into the back garden, where he had prepared a little blaze of our own — just us two; his square and sturdy hands feeding twigs to the flame and then — wonder of wonders — strips of coloured newspaper comics, which danced in the fire in plumes of red, yellow and blue.

It was thrilling, sitting shadowed by the black silhouettes of the coniferous trees, seeing my father’s face in the fiery glow.

Perhaps one clear autumn night I will make a fire of my own, feed the flames as he did, twig by twig. And as the stars wink above, for the grand finale, I will catch newsprint ablaze and watch the colours dance, giving thanks for my father and the many gifts he gave me.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com | X: @Pam_Frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social