Something in the air

My favorite time of year is upon us: fall. As much as I love spring, it just can't compete with the crisp air and colorful leaves of autumn. Although Houston doesn't exactly experience these in full effect (the air is still humid and has no fall smell whatsoever, and only a few leaves have begun to change), there is something about knowing it is fall that is extremely comforting. There's a coziness about fall, the desire to put on sweaters and scarves and boots and sip a cup of warm tea. It makes me want to make applesauce and bake sweets. There is also a pretty significant secret to life that comes with autumn. It is a season that marks the coming of death, or even death itself, with the leaves slowly drying and falling from trees. But in this death is beauty. Looking down a tree-lined street in fall is a breathtaking sight, like looking through a kaleidoscope of reds, greens, yellows, oranges. If nature knows how to do anything, it's to go out with a bang. There simply is nothing like the hued foliage of autumn that comes as we say goodbye to the leaves of this year as they make room for the leaves of next. As Albert Camus put it, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." The leaves' death is almost a rebirth of sorts, a last hurrah. They receive new beauty as they die away. There is also a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that expresses the magnificence of the diverse world we live in, which I can't help but think of whenever I look at the widely ranging colors of fall leaves.

Pied Beauty 

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.