Here we are, well into my favorite month, and what do I have to show for it? October has crept up on me, sidling in on a string of faux-summer days. Now the clock is running, and I am feeling a certain urgency. It’s the time I wait for all year, and I want to savor every moment.
I did get a glimpse of what’s ahead on a recent visit to Connecticut. Fall was in full swing there, maples blazing, sumac trailing its red vines over stone walls. The wind that sent orange leaves swirling down country lanes already had a chill to it. Back at my old school where I had returned for a class reunion, the first fire of the season crackled on the front hall hearth. Beyond the trees, pale sun glinted on the gray water of the sound.
Autumn light is the light of memory, an elegiac light in which the past seems at once very near and impossibly distant. Among my classmates, the sharp edges have smoothed out over the decades. Ancient grudges and historic slights surfaced again, but now as funny stories told over cocktails. A slide show of our yearbook pictures ran in the dining room, teenaged faces framed by flips and pageboys, still untouched by the world beyond the wrought-iron school gates. The archivist had been busy. Our old school uniform in all its plaid pleated glory graced a dressmaker’s mannequin posed beneath the video screen. Designed to flatter every figure, someone quipped, and we remembered tacking up our hems with Scotch tape and rubbing chalk over the grimy collars of white uniform blouses.
We sat at round tables and called up ghosts: the black-habited nuns who had taught us Shakespeare and Latin and how to pray in three languages and make beds with perfect hospital corners. We talked about the implacable and irreplaceable discipline of those olden days, and how it had shaped us for the trials to come. We spoke of the class members we have lost, and toasted them with lemonade. We told the stories our grandchildren now beg to hear, about ringing the tower bell and sneaking cigarettes in the barn near the hockey field. We looked from the pictures on the screen to the faces at the table and read what life had written on each one.
Later, we sat in a single pew in the chapel. Once we filled several rows, giggling behind missals or deep in ardent prayer over an upcoming algebra test. Dahlias from the front lawn gardens glowed like jewels in the altar vases, and the air smelled faintly of incense and furniture polish, just as it always did. We sang the school song, led by a choir of current students in their own plaid uniforms. Outside, a shower of leaves blew across the steps of the towering new athletic center.
Autumn light is the light of longing, a quiet light that stirs us to return home and look for what we left behind, see again the places we thought we knew. On the front steps where we posed for graduation photos 50 years ago, we paused once more to say goodbye. You look wonderful, we told each other. Now, as then, it was the truth.
Back in Knoxville, the month unwinds in a skein of mellow days. The yellow glare of summer fades to a dim gold, turning everyday scenery into gilded landscapes. Purple ironweed and goldenrod bloom in ditches and vacant lots and the kudzu blossoms, its grape scent lingering. The year slows to a measured pace, inviting reflection. The urgency recedes. I’ve gone far away and come back and it’s still October. History is a pattern of timeless moments, T.S. Eliot wrote. I plan to savor this one for a long while.
Stephanie Piper's At This Point examines the mystery, absurdity, and persistent beauty of daily life. She has been a newspaper reporter, editor, and award-winning columnist for more than 30 years. Her Midpoint column appeared monthly in Metro Pulse from 1997 until 2014.
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