The season of Autumn is not really a season at all, but a middle-ground – a bridge between the warm, bright days of summer, and the dark, lifeless ones of winter. It is in this unbelonging season that we hear the last few peals of green, dew-drenched laughter, but not without the whispered promise of decay maliciously muting our last vernal pleasures. Autumn has never belonged, never felt that sense of oneness with the seasons, though it weaves them into a whole, brings and binds the farthest ends of the varicolored tapestry of months.
It must be this characteristic estrangement that prompts the bitterness, the pervasive cynicism. Its alienation is contagious – falls with the bloodied leaves to touch our troubled souls, and burden us with the onus of emptiness. The stillness is suffocating the stertorous breathing of Zephyrus is mixed with and pitted against the vigorous gusts of Boreas.
The trees blush at winter’s rude, inexorable power, as the White Thing slips its frosted fingers over the ashen mouths of color and life. Gradually, the color is drained from the land, until, with many a false start, the ochre earth is all at once subdued in snow: the White Virgin enjoys her brief and noble reign.
Many hold the mistaken belief that Autumn, as the other seasons, occurs but once a year; in reality, it comes twice. The slow, unpunctual and unpredictable shift from winter to spring is the second Autumn, the second limbo of the seasons’ reign. The trees, still barren, cradle their hardening buds against the alternating rains and snows, then put out in faith their stems and blossoms, trusting the fickle, deceitful hand of no one in particular. The snow peels back its rotting gums to reveal a layer of decaying leaves studded with scintillating emerald pricks. Even as their thorny stems are upward sent, the putrid stuff that rots at their bases dies to bring new green.
And so is Autumn: the bridge between the seasons so precariously narrow that much must be left behind. There is no foregoing the bridge, no lessening of the gap it spans. Instead with heavy hearts we march across its buckling length, holding fast the cord that binds both sides.
Though tempted we may be to claw and snatch at the season now receding, or drunkenly grope for the next, it is the way of fools. Rather, embrace the changing for the change being brought. Fear not the Middle Months and their intractable ways; for we will never know the loving fire of our mother’s bosom if we do not leave the feeble warmth of our cradle, and suspend those cold, uncertain moments in between.
Jonathan Warkentine is a College freshman from Almaty, Kazakhstan.
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