(Un)Seasonal Rejuvenation

It has been some time since I spent autumn in Lincoln. The season seems affectionate, but fickle. Days of sunlight and wet warmth follow a few days of cloudy chill, and then the reverse. I may be learning how to read the season as much as it is learning to respond to me as I have been trudging out on my bicycle everyday after the early--and rather perturbing--snowfall on Friday; that day I spent almost exclusively inside, hoping that it would disappear if I just ignored it long enough, which it actually did. Now, though, I bundle up with sweatshirt, jacket, scarf, hat, wool socks, and gloves, get on my bicycle, and pedal away despite the changing season and its occasional bite. I have been rewarded, I feel, for embracing it.

On Saturday and the days since, I have been surprised and enlivened by the scents and hues abounding. Autumn is a season for harvest, preservation, and expectation for the winter to come; it is not a season that particularly celebrates new life and rejuvenation. All the same, I take profound satisfaction in overrunning a carpet of soggy yellow leaves on 27th Street, crackling and crinkling as my wheels crash over them, stimulating a mouldy, squash-y sort of scent that is so characteristic of this time of year. If I were at school, I would likely have begun my long internments in the library, happily shuffling through this or that cultural studies book, Wired and Utne magazines, a science fiction book or something I had uncovered by happenstance, and working away on whatever classes I would be taking. For the first time in years, I feel like I am really paying attention to the shift out of summer, as I am removed from all those distractions of academia. (I might add, that I do have quite a bit of fondness for such distractions, but right now I am enjoying new items to dote over.)

Ruby red leaves and warm, filtered light; soft, wet soil and its accompanying odor; the corresponding cool, saturated air and dry, wintry gusts all find their ways to captivate me. I sense a secretive abundance, the stores of energy and life in plants and the soil, bustling creatures and people, each with their movements, scents, sights, and textures. While my mother and I create cookbooks replete with squash soups and peanut butter bars, beet salads and pecan pies, savory apple bakes and sprouted wheat loaves, and I anticipate their use, their taste, their times for ripeness and richness. I doubt if ever I have felt so strongly the importance of harvest and storage, the role of life in this time when the living already anticipate the anxieties of the winter. I know the cold ahead, the ice and snow and wind that can bare down ruthlessly, that snaps trees in half but brings out blankets to share, cuts out power but ignites fireplaces, that paves roads in ice but allows for sledding and snowball fights. I was tempted by the first snow to brood on the frustrations ahead. Now, I cannot help but be excited by the significance, the uncanny liveliness of autumn and winter, of their own, somehow less obvious celebrations. And again, I am made warm by such thoughts.