Autumn Leaves

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

AUTUMN LEAVES

We handle the many daily aspects of our lives: work, family, meals, going to the dentist, Monday wash day, Tuesday ironing. (Ironing? Yeah, I’m just kidding.) Anyway, we’re busy people. We have things to do.

Meanwhile, quietly, the calendar runs in the background of our lives: September, October, November. The months change without much fanfare, each day similar to the one before.

It’s that calendar (and a bit of persuasion from the sun) that pulls the seasons along. Those seasons change without our meddling, and that’s probably a good thing, because we humans could not, would not, agree on how a season should be operated. Seasons would be dismantled, deconstructed, dismembered, reconfigured, reapportioned, reconstituted, and, naturally there would be politics applied, and, speaking for everyone, I think we are all just about politicked out.

So, luckily, whether or not we’re fond of a particular season, they spin around us, coming and going, oblivious to our individual wants and needs.

Summer exits, fall enters. The sun shines (or not), the sky thunders (occasionally), the clouds spit rain, sleet and snow, the wind brings us fresh air and cold fronts and the neighbor’s leaves.

Seasons give us weather; weather gives us something to talk about. So it all works out.

For anyone thinking about moving to this state, we can sell them on the fact that Kansas has the full range of seasons. From very cold temperatures to the very hot and everything in between – we have it all! One stop shopping for all your weather needs. Plus, for those thrill-seekers, we have thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Being a four-season state, we get a new view out the window, a new landscape every three months. Simply stay in one place and a new season comes to you with no delivery charge or set-up fee.

Summer and winter are the heavy-weights, the anchor seasons. They are deliberate in their agendas and fairly predictable in their temperatures. Summer is warm-to-broiling. Winter is cold-to-frigid.

But those other players, spring and fall, are transition seasons and we don’t always get our money’s worth out of them. Spring and fall seldom take up their quarter’s worth of calendar space.

We’ve had some delicious fall days, but summer-like temperatures held on through October this year. Winter will kick down the door on autumn any day now and throw ice and snow at us and that will be that. Fall will be over.

On the other side of the year, spring is often shy in showing up and when she does, summer shoves the spindly spring aside, turns up the heat, and away we go. Some years we’re feeling the sultriness of summer by the end of May.

The trees dress up, the trees dress down. What spring raises, autumn razes. Fall will have nothing to do with the color green and it turns those green shades to tan, yellow, orange and red. Fallen leaves are the footprints of autumn, the trail of the season. Eventually those remnants of fall will turn to dust.

It’s been a good fall weather-wise, for me anyway. It was my kind of October – full of 70- and 80-degree days. Summer’s warmth has lingered longer than one could reasonably expect. There were only one or two October days when I grabbed a jacket before heading out the door.

We’ve reached the dark side of autumn. Mid-November. It’s another month before winter officially begins, but winter comes when it will. We’ll all slide down the thermometer together.

Up until now, we have been wearing autumn, snuggled in our sweaters. But it’s time to dig into the closet to find our hats and gloves and scarves once again. And before long, we’ll also need those snow boots.

The seasons change around us and we adapt to each one. Fall is a good season to hang around in, but autumn leaves way too soon.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh