2020 Fall Amidst the Pandemic

 The weather has changed, as I had expected. Though the temperature will even reach the seventies this week, the air feels of Fall. The wind blows with certain purpose and there is a nip to the air. Squirrels squirrel over the ground catching up nuts and raisins to store for the long winter months. I watch them out of my windows scurry about. Soon they will gather fallen leaves, climb themselves to the tree tops and build their winter homes. I think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper.  The birds seem to feast at the feeders more voraciously as they prepare to migrate. I take my corduroy trousers out of the closet where I had stored them during the summer months and I make sure my sweaters are clean and ready for cold mornings and chilly nights. I look at the pages of the catalogs for flannel shirts. I know that there are still glorious days to enjoy ahead, but much will change with the leaves.

     Summer ends unofficially on Labor Day and officially three weeks later at the equinox. For me, summer has always served as the emblem of freedom. From the earliest cry of “No more pencils no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks” to the silencing of necessary alarm clocks, summer has represented an end to the necessity of responsibility. Even when I did have to be gainfully employed during the summer months, the knowledge that it was temporary relieved the restrictions. And from those jobs I never had to bring any work home. Summer reading always consisted of unassigned books, sometimes even forbidden ones. During the summers I indulged in tomes such as War and Peace or Les Misérables or The Brothers Karamazov. Summer invited late lazy nights and endless days.

     And so the end of summer invites a certain sadness as the openness of the body to the warm even steamy air closes up and I experience a growing physical tightness. The end of summer had meant the beginning of the academic year. As a student I didn’t mind this event, but as a teacher and then a professor it produced a sadness at the end of the independence and autonomy that summer had offered. Even now in retirement, the familiar smell in the air of Fall inspires a physical twinge that is a spiritual sadness at freedom’s loss.

     I do love the Fall. The leaves turn magnificent colors before they drift down, and the days are often sun drenched and warm. But the air contains a certain crispness, even a cleanness as the Earth prepares for the deaths that Winter will bring. The heavy rains of Fall will weaken the hold of leaves on their branches and the winds will soon blow the browning leaves down. The end of summer portends the inevitability of the coming of Winter and the dormancy of all of Nature.