Autumn. Every autumn has always reminded me of every other autumn, probably because, for so long, my year began in September with the start of school. Crisp air, turning leaves, and I am there – everywhere I had been before (at yearly intervals), every classroom, every walk to the library, every Saturday passed in the beauty of the leaves. Apples: dipped in caramel, or as hot cider. And, as I moved into adolescence, The Poem, by e.e. cummings, of course, speaking the essence of my autumnal soul:
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness.
That started in high school and returned to reunite with me every year since. By the time the new school year had moved from late summer days into fall, I had once again disappointed myself: all my plans and hopes for a new beginning, the childish dream of recreating myself as a new me, had failed. From the start, it was a slowly read/spoken/thought poem, brief as it is, but drawn out by me, full of all the wistfulness, longing, and inward travel that autumn evoked: an ending, as well as a beginning.
Autumn, like other times and other things, went through a faltering period after I left school and began the search for my grown self. My being was so attuned to the seasonal change, that I continued in the old atmosphere for years after the last paper was turned in, the last test taken. With no outer assignment, I unwittingly gave myself one: a yearly reading of my “autumn” novel, May Sarton’s “Kinds of Love.” A creature of habits, I have worn the same scarf – dark green and covered with colored leaves and mushrooms – from October till the end of November. An apple in any form still holds the magic.
But the poem, which hasn’t left me, has somehow managed to alter. Just when it happened, or how, I couldn’t say. It didn’t used to bring a tune with it, though it could have – “Autumn Leaves” would have worked. One day I was raking neighborhood leaves (the back yard, something of a downhill bowl, accumulates a botanist’s delight in the array of leaves which gather from who knows where, but are unrelated to the trees in this yard). Raking leaves, and including a bit of free form movement, unobserved as I believed myself to be, and I heard it. The Poem was in my mind, of course, but now it had an accompaniment: “Take Five!”
How could it be, and how could that work? Yet, it does. Embedded in The Poem I have always seen my autumnal accompanying mood: “loneliness.” Even when I’m not feeling lonely, the season itself can evoke it. After so many years, I finally saw the other word embedded: oneliness. Is it a word? It is at least a state of being, sometimes meaning, for me, that I am one person in the world, sometimes that I am one with the world, the season, the leaves, the raking dance. Suspend disbelief, and judgment, and try it. Just cautiously at first, slowly .. and listen.
What can this mean? For me, not a rejection of times remembered, nor the pleasant habits and associations I have with autumn. They don’t hurt me, and I enjoy them. And friends with a sense of occasion seem to appreciate them, as well. The music that arrived all unexpected seems to tell me, simply, take a break, a breath. Suspend the sense of world and being part of it, or not, and just dance your free form with the leaves. So I do. I take five and watch a leaf fall.
Dave Brubeck original video
newleafsite 