How wistful our autumn years

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

There's something about growing older that makes a person a little nutty about the seasons. It makes a person behave as if she's never before seen a tree turned all orange, or a pumpkin, or a garden transformed by mums. ``Hey, what do you know? It's fall, already. Hard to believe that summer is over. Where did it go?'' What child says these things? Or adolescent walking to school? ``Look at the way the sun lights up that yard. And the berries on that mountain ash. Wow.'' This does not happen. But adults? We're consumed by the changes a season brings.

And not just in everyday, front-of-the-post-office banter. ``Beautiful morning, isn't it? Couldn't be better. Wish they could all be like this one.'' We're consumed in the stillness, too, when we're alone. In spring, we notice the flowers and the world coming to life, and not in a passing way, but in a profound one, stunned by the cycle and wowed by the beauty that spring always brings. In summer, it's the sun that's our focus. And in winter, it's the sun on the snow. And in fall? Now? Now is like every other season - a rerun, a been here, done that. We've walked down this road dozens of times before. Except here we are feeling as if this is our first fall.

Is it because we're getting old? Or because the world never gets old? How is this possible? I see trees that have shed their leaves every year for dozens of years. And yet am stunned that it's happening once more, blown away by the touches of gold, the hints of cinnamon, the arrays of red, all familiar colors. Though there's nothing new under the sun. Except that all these familiar colors somehow feel new.

I open the door in the morning to pick up the paper, and I know what I'll smell: cold and leaves and car exhaust and wood smoke and apples. And I'm ready for this. It's the perfume of the season and I've smelled it before. Although this fragrance is old, far older than I am, it's new, too, exactly what I expect. But more.

The handsomest things that man makes grow stale with time - a favorite restaurant, a favorite place, hotels, entire cities, even a song. Tastes change. Things wear out. Or something better comes along.

Only nature is eternal. Only nature can pull the same tricks out of the same bag year after year after year and make us feel like children at a magic show.

``There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle,'' Albert Einstein wrote. The trouble is we are too used to miracles. The sun comes up every morning, and sets every night. The moon rises. Stars shine. It's all a miracle. Every minute of our lives. But we don't notice - not every day.

But then the season changes and for a moment, a day, a few days, we look up from our lives, we look up and away from TV and the newspapers, from politics and war and the evil that people do, up and away from the world we have made and into ourselves and out at the world we were given. And we see the miracle that is eternity, where what always was always will be, no matter what else is happening.

Where falls arrives predictably but miraculously, every year, a switch flicked, the air suddenly cleaner, the sun brighter, the shadows deeper. Where spider webs glisten and birds flock and squirrels scutter and trees and pumpkins are orange, and stoops and gardens are transformed by mums.

And we are transformed, too. For a while anyway. Transformed and transfixed by a day in the life of the world.