When the Leaves Fall

I like air conditioning in the summer mornings. When I wake, and pull myself out of bed, there is a chill in the air: it feels like autumn, if even for a second. Summer here in North Texas (where I’ve made my home for an alarming seven years now) is so brutal lately as to be overwhelming. I was reading another blog which talked about change being slow, inevitable, and arriving when it will. That is North Texas. Summer arrives sometime in May (usually) and won’t leave until well after solstice, until it is good and ready.

Leaves don’t fall from trees in North Texas because the days have finally turned chilly and the sunlight is fading above branches. No, leaves fall because the land turns parched in the scorching sun, and there is little to sustain them in the boughs of their tree. Even today, two days removed from October, leaves litter my lawn and driveway and the high will be near 100 on the Fahrenheit scale. This morning I awoke to the artificial chill, and longed for true autumn. It will arrive slowly, heralded by what summer should feel like in more temperate, reasonable climes. Sometime around November and into December will come a chill in the air, chased out by a warm, sunny afternoon.

By January and February, something like real cold will descend just to remind people what jackets and hoodies are for, before leaving for a brief spring. Summer roars back in a vengeance, withholding rain and drenching all the lands in harsh sunlight once more. Or so it has seemed and been for the years I have lived here. Certainly climate change is working its dark, evil magic on weather patterns, and maybe in the long ago before times Texas wasn’t so harsh, so much a crucible to test a person’s will to live in heat and misery. I know not, that was long before me.

I remind myself of autumn with decorations and false maple leaves strewn around my living room, and a picture of mountains topped with arboreal color on my computer’s desktop. It almost works. For a brief time, when the AC turns on again to blow cool air into the room, and I lose myself in the image, I can dream of autumn. It “…shakes me like a cry/ Of bugles going by” as a favorite poet, Bliss Carman, would say. A “touch of manner, hint of mood” he would say about the penultimate season. That is all I feel I grasp here in North Texas.

It may not always be so, and wasn’t. I grew up in Virginia where the four seasons lived when I was young. I also spent time in upper New York State and Penn’s Woods where four seasons yet reign (though New York was, like Wisconsin after, ironically flipped from Texas. There winter never wanted to leave, slumbering deep beneath heavy blankets of snow, if you’ll pardon the cliché). Maybe someday I’ll journey like a vagabond once more to a place where leaves change in the chill of real cold. Maybe someday.

For now, I’ll try to make my peace with the pieces of fall that I do get, artificial or not, and turn the calendar page from September to October, though the seeming eternal summer still reigns outside. Just now, I can hear through the (closed) window the muted roar of someone’s lawnmower. Grass grows again following recent, begrudging rain. We haven’t needed to mow for months of drought. Lawns leapt upwards in hope, only to be cruelly cut down. I wouldn’t really care to cut grass, except for the conformity of it all and the fact that suddenly, in the tall spikes, I can lose sight of my small dog and I’d rather she not have to struggle through thickets just to pee. No one should, really.

The morning train barrels by behind my house, and shakes me from my reverie. Time to be about the busyness of life. May autumn bring blessings to you, wherever you be and whenever she arrives. When the leaves fall, may it remind you, not of death, but of the new life that shedding old things brings.