Casting my vote for season of the year

Every season of the year has its own special charm, but if you cornered me and said, “OK, undecided voter, it’s time to make your choice,” I would cast my vote for autumn without a moment’s hesitation.

I’ll admit that much of my love for fall is tied up in nostalgia, in memories that I will never relive again. Gone are the piles of elm leaves raked into the street and set ablaze, into which we kids would toss apples and potatoes, and then rake them from the ashes to eat, charred husks and all. I think that fragrant, savory memory is why I still like to toast bagels and English muffins almost black, until the smoke alarm threatens to squawk.

Gone, too, are the weeks spent planning what costume to wear on Halloween. Those plans almost always ended up with “hobo,” because tattered flannel shirts and torn jeans were easy to find around the house, and Mom could always find a wine cork to char and paint an ashy beard on my chin.

So yes, a lot of my love of autumn is linked to forever-gone memories of long-ago. But beyond the nostalgia, autumn always brings me pleasures that still eclipse any other season of the year.

Take the rows of ripe corn, for example, monotonously green from day to day through the summer, but now sporting a burnt honey glow, even after they’re shorn down to stubble. If the Crayola company is looking for a can’t-lose new color, may I suggest “October Corn.”

Or take the autumn insect neighbors I meet every evening on my walk through the meadow and around the lake, like the praying mantises longer than my finger. They were no bigger than a mosquito when they hatched in early June from their toasted-marshmallow egg case. Through the summer they have feasted on aphids, and then crickets, and now on plump green grasshoppers. Those green and brown adult mantises today are searching for each other to mate and start the egg-laying once again, because none of them will survive winter.

Also out now are the orange-and-black wooly bear caterpillars, which my friend Jimmy Mulvihill tells me are called “Hairy Mollys” in Ireland. Unlike the mantises, they will survive winter, because their blood contains a kind of antifreeze that lets them burrow into leaf piles and linger until spring, when they will sprout their wings to become Isabella tiger moths.Besides the bugs, nothing can beat the birds of autumn: The hummingbirds flitting around my feeder, sucking so greedily from it that I have to refill it almost every day. Or the geese and sandhill cranes flying noisily overhead. Or the flocks of blackbirds gathering by the hundreds in the oaks behind my house, singing a song in unison that rises louder and louder — until I clap my hands and they fall silent, only to begin again a few seconds later. They will all be gone soon.

And then there are the shortening days, of course, each one a wonder unto itself, reminding you to stop and look long and hard now, because it will all change soon enough. Brisk mornings at daybreak, with the meadow draped with fog. Evenings with golden sunlight setting the yellowing oak leaves ablaze. Nights cool enough to spark up the firepit on the patio, with no worry of mosquitos now. But even if a few stragglers linger, they are no match against the cozy thick hoodie and sweat pants that have waited all summer to get back in the game.

And then, of course, there is my garden, brown and bedraggled of late, but only just now coming into its true purpose. It was originally planted by my wife, and if she were here she would disagree with me about the best season of all. To her, the purpose of those flowers was to provide beauty to the eye and the nose, and once they browned and wilted, it was time to “dead-head” them.

But with her passing six years ago, her garden came to me, and I see those dried flower heads as the final triumph and true purpose of the flower all along—the imperative of creating seeds for the next generation of flowers.

Through June and July, the garden lured bees, moths, and butterflies with color and fragrance, tricking them into laboring all day (and sometimes all night) as the flowers’ pollination slaves. That work is finished now, but it is only now that the curtain opens on the garden’s final magnificent closing act—dozens of goldfinches, sparrows, and cardinals flitting from seedhead to seedhead, their song twittering through the yard. They will eat enough of the seeds to power their bodies for the long migration they will soon take, but they will also drop enough seeds to create next year’s bounty of rusty cone flowers and yellow heliopsis.

It’s all happening right now, but it won’t last much longer. Soon all that wonderful activity will end, and the land will sleep through the still, quiet, waiting season of winter.

In time spring will come, and I’ll surely put on my Make Another Garden Again hat. I’ll enjoy wearing it all through spring and summer, and I will relish every day of those seasons.

But the whole time I will be looking forward to once again casting my vote for my favorite season of all — autumn.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com

---