When the words “Autumnal Equinox” appear on the calendar, as they did on Saturday, they send a little chill through the heart as well as the body. Labor Day is one thing, but this is official. Summer is over. This is the moment when our Earth, or at least our hemisphere, begins to tilt away from the sun. A cosmic event like this should be more dramatic. But nothing much changes, not yet.
A few sunbirds flutter off in the direction of Florida, unable or unwilling to face meteorological reality. The rest of us continue our lives almost exactly as before. The temperature drops, the thermostat clicks, and the heat comes on. A warm afternoon, the thermostat clicks again and here comes the air conditioning again, keeping our delicate bodies at an even 72 degrees. The fruits and vegetables in the supermarket scarcely vary. We have eliminated the natural seasons, leaving only the commercial seasons. I suppose we are trying to convince ourselves, with some success, that we are not actually living on a ball of dirt spinning and wobbling in an infinite freezing void, but in a kind of huge indoor shopping mall open 24/7.
We do embrace some small lifestyle changes in autumn. As the evenings grow darker we tend to read more, watch more TV, exercise less, and eat much more as we prepare ourselves for the great food ordeals of the coming months. The first diet-busting displays of Halloween candy are already on display in our local supermarket along with heaps of premature pumpkins. It’s happening, whether we like it or not.
For homeowners, fall is a season of threats and worries: problems with the yard and the gutters, as billions of leaves fall, the storm windows that never quite fit, and the old heating furnace, which has been neglected all this time. Things will freeze. We will freeze. Our winter clothes, carefully packed in mothballs in April, emerge from their boxes full of moth holes. The mice in the garage have already moved indoors to enjoy the central heating. The poet William Cullen Bryant called autumnal days as “The Melancholy Days, the saddest of the year.”
And yet, however unlikely it seems, autumn has also been celebrated as a special time. Keats famously called it called it the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” which sounds lovely. Traditions gather around this time of year: harvest festivals, Thanksgiving, Halloween.
This just goes to show the human genius for making the best of a bad job. We can’t do anything about autumn, any more than we can about life itself. But we can make it festive, and above all we can embrace the circularity of things. What saves us from SAD, or seasonal affective disorder, is the repetition of the seasons. The turning earth, like the turning wheel of fortune, will bring us back to warmth and sunshine. Autumn is about hope and the stubborn confidence that we will survive the seasonal celebrations, the enormous meals, the nor’easters, the snow, and everything else that’s coming our way in the coming months, and emerge on the other side into spring. What doesn’t kill us, we hope, will make us stronger.
Copyright: David Bouchier
