Ode to October

Revisiting the autumn of life

This essay from The Abundance was first published in October, 2021 and is re-printed here as we fall deeper into the season.

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“There’s something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that.”
― Hermann Hesse

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Today, I made my yearly appointment with the cardiologist, scheduled for the day after my birthday. I will see him on the morning after I turn 65, in the heart of my autumnal years. In the heart of autumn.

Autumn has a deeper meaning for me these days. I have always loved the season of diminishing light and crisp evenings and falling leaves. But now that the October of my life is the here and now, not some distant season, I am determined to find a way to embrace it, to celebrate it. I’m a new grandfather, for one. That should help.

When I was a younger man, I couldn’t imagine being old. Maybe 65 is the new 45, but still, there are fewer days in front than behind. It’s just the way the seasons unfold. At times I catch a glimpse of those final days off in the distance, but despite that, there is still a lot of life to live. And for me, that means living creatively; living a creative life.

Writers have always evoked the beauty and awakening of spring, those days of light rain and budding flowers, the re-emergence of the singing birds, the sun moving higher in the blue sky. It’s the time of year for renewal. But autumn, for the writer, contains the most depth. It’s more complex, our emotions more layered, every sense enlivened with the crackle of leaves in the breeze. Fall brings reflection more than any other season. We are weary of summer and autumn permits us to find solace from the hurried, active life of those warmer months, to go deeper into ourselves. And the light, we can’t forget the light of autumn. It is golden and sentimental. Paintings of fall landscapes are more vivid than those of other seasons; they hold a special glow. I think of View Van Gogh’s many paintings of fall, especially Autumn Landscape. Photographs are deeper and richer. I think of Falling Waters by Thomas Heinz or Autumn Brook by Olegas Kurasovas, a stunning photo submitted to National Geographic’s “Your Shot.”

And books. Yes, the books. Read Ali Smith’s Autumn, a story about the friendship between a woman and the elderly man who babysat her when she was a child, a book about the fleeting nature of the season and of time itself. Or take in “November Night,” the poem by Adelaide Crapsey.

Like step of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost crisp’d, break from the trees,

And fall.

There’s also Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Autumn, one of the volumes of his seasonal quartet. The New York Times calls it a book “full of wonders.” “In this author’s hands,” the reviewer writes, “the world feels repainted.”

And that is what autumn does, it repaints. It helps us with perspective, to see a richer and fuller experience, to see our time here on Earth as part of a larger landscape connected to the shifting seasons of new beginnings and eventually autumn’s fading glorious light.

A few years ago, I wrote a book about the autumn of life, how we ultimately reflect and how we might embrace it to find something new and revitalizing. October Song a personal story of a young man’s dream coming true in the autumn of life, and how time recalculates expectations of what we can be and who we are.

So, in a few weeks I’ll head for the cardiologist’s office, and he’ll listen to the beat of my heart, and he’ll ask if I’m getting regular exercise and how I’m feeling, and he’ll likely schedule an electrocardiogram and a stress test. A few weeks afterward, he’ll send me the results. And late on a future autumn evening, as I read his analysis, I’ll see out of the corner of my eye, through the window, a street lamp shining on a tall maple, the tree’s leaves golden in vapors of light surrounded by the blackness of the seasonal sky, and I’ll be grateful for nights like this, for a heart that’s still beating, for the chance in the days that remain to fill each one with experience, and emotion, and to welcome the coming days of life’s winter—the January and February of life—knowing that October was as beautiful as one would have hoped it to be.

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Photo by Pixabay