Automne est arrive…
It’s almost that time again, when the leaves will start to fall from the trees (late October for us spoiled here on the coast) and the night becomes cold enough to see our breath escape into the chilly night air.
Farmers also look forward to this time of year as it is traditionally the season of the harvest and a time of plenty. Pumpkins and the cornucopia, that symbol of harvest also known as the horn of plenty, featured on so many items of fall décor, represent to us this time of plenty.
The season of Autumn gained it’s name from a French word, Autompne, which essentially was taken from the Latin word for the season, Autumnus or Auctumnus. However, it would be three century’s before the word Autumn replaced the word harvest as the accepted name of the season.
The other common term we use to give name to the coming of chillier weather and pumpkin spice lattes becoming available at a friendly coffee shop near you is Fall, which was actually culled from the phrase ‘fall of the leaf’ or ‘fall of the year’, which was popular around 1545 in British circles. Later, when the American colonies were established, the term came with the British settlers and stuck, despite the fact that the slang term fell from favor in England over the years for the more traditional Autumn and now is strictly an American term.
Of course, as with all human traditions that span many centuries, the ‘fall of the year’ has taken on some new aspects for a modern world.
Football season begins at this time of year, and you can almost feel the anticipation across the great state of Texas as it approaches, men waiting with excitement and promise for a new season and a fresh start.
Baseball seasons ends, as most of the country says goodbye to longer days and hello to shorter nights as we move forward from the days of hot dogs and soda and into the days of pumpkin pies and hot cocoa.
Halloween is just around the corner if you have not noticed it in the stores, meaning that Thanksgiving and Christmas and all that comes with the Holiday Season is coming. Fast.
Beyond the common themes and commercially promoted trappings, there surely is an almost magical-like quality in the season. It is the time each year that leads us from the death of one year and all that has passed in it, to the birth of a new year swaddled in cold and discomfort, waiting to arise out of the Spring thaw with promises anew and a different direction, like a rare flower pushing it’s way up to the sun from the cold Earth.
Fall is a time of reflection, a time to cast out and forget the old ways that you might still be clinging to. Like a leaf on a tree, you realize that you can let go of the past while still surviving and persevering the hardened frost glazed days, even in the harshest months of Winter when the air is cold and the clouds make scarce of the sun early in the day.
Others, of course, cannot stand the season, as the eternal heat, fun and freedom of long Summer weekend’s are over, to be replaced by being stuck in the house and a new Fall television lineup to help you whittle away the hours you once spent on the beach or on the water.
Some even get depressed by the shorter days and longer nights, a condition known as Seasonal Affective Disorder.
So, if the feeling of Falls arrival fills you with dread beyond the normal ‘heebie jeebies’ associated with Halloween, you just can’t bare another pumpkin flavored or shaped product or you just miss the sun being up late, let me leave you with the words of infamous poet John Keats, who in another September, way back in 1819, had this to say about this much misunderstood and under appreciated season in his poem To Autumn:
“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,- “
