Bracing for fall: A change in seasons is the weightlessness of being
We're at that point on the seasonal ride approaching the weightlessness of being.
That is, the moment after the moment when you've peaked and are starting down the incline. On a roller coaster, I've often suspected if we could float in air, this would be the precise moment we would, but only for a moment.
It's the same with the weather. The calendar says summer is over - most kids went back to school this week while others are going back even as you read this - but the warmth of the sun is very real and there are still plenty of mild days, though they seem to take longer to start and feel like they end sooner.
When I get up in the mornings now, I have a light sweater or jacket on for the first time since I'm guessing the early part of May. And my after-dinner walk around my neighborhood starts earlier and is shorter because the disappearance of the light in the evening disheartens me.
On a recent oh-bright-early Saturday morning traipse around Spaulding Pond in Mohegan Park, I could see far more autumn foliage in the tree canopies overhead than when I was there just a few Saturdays earlier. In a couple of more weeks, even more of the sky will peek through as the leaves turn brown and then fall off.
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I'm bracing for the part of the year I dislike the most - real fall, not the Second Summer part that doesn't fool, or placate, me anymore but the slate gray sky and the chill in the air that makes it very clear winter is approaching.
Winter (and you may find this funny and/or pathetic) I’ve made my peace with because I know spring and summer follow. It’s fall that is the hopeless and helpless season in my book, a time of inevitable decline and deepening dark.
I've been in a hurry most of my life - always rushing to some place or away from someone. The pace is less frenetic now, the strides more unsteady and labored. I passed a couple on Chelsea Parade recently pushing a small child in a pram and could see in my mind's eye my wife and I with our son, Patrick, at a duck pond in Germany where Frankfurt am Main ended, and Offenbach started. They/we looked so happy, and the horizon was wide open. For us, that was over 35 years ago, gone in the blink of an eye.
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The high school girl jogging past us, in the opposite direction, earbuds (though I too often still call them headphones) in place and a solemn mask-like face, could have been our daughter, Michelle, the picture of concentration as she practiced for her audition for her high school's musical honor society (and blew the judges away). That was almost two decades ago. People often change but our memories of them stay the same.
I was there for all those moments and tens of thousands more but, like now (I imagine), I was thinking about other places and times. Just as we all do, I'm sure. As Paul Simon observed, “Now I sit by my window, and I watch the cars. I fear I'll do some damage one fine day. But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers - still crazy after all these years."
Bill Kenny, of Norwich, writes a weekly column about Norwich issues. His blog, Tilting at Windmills, can be accessed at https://tiltingatwindmills-dweeb.blogspot.com/.
This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Bracing for fall: A change in seasons is the weightlessness of being
