I love autumn here in Minnesota. Heck, I even like the word 'autumn' - it has a slightly archaeic spelling that calls to mind the polyglot, ancient roots of the English language, and reminds me that some of my forebears' family name is 'Herbst,' the German word for autumn that sounds even more like 'harvest' in that language than 'fall' and 'autumn' do auf Englisch.
When my children were young this was the exciting culmination of the growing season. After a summer that filled their tummies with green beans and beets and zucchini and tomatoes and raspberries from our mostly-organic home garden, the pumpkins and gourds and squashes and apples were ready to pick. And the changeable weather here made that part of the harvest something of a contest: I can still hear my own grandfather warning me that we might have frost as late as Memorial Day and as early as Labor Day.
I'll get back to Granpa in a little while, but I can't forget to add that autumn is perhaps Minnesota's best season, when we see both the abudance of spring and summer, and the coming scantness of winter. It's a dual personality season that offers a little something for everyone working to be planet friendly and sustainable. I'll start with the leaves.
We can't burn them curbside as was the habit when I was a girl, but many neighborhoods have a day for gathering and bagging or tarping leaves and carrying them away (or having them carried) to a district composting site. The busyness and sense of joint purpose is invigorating, brings us out to look at one another, and gets kids who don't always play with one another sharing piles of leaves for fort-building and jumping into. The colors and scents are distinctive to each variety of tree - the plain yellow walnut fronds, vivid red, orange and gold maples, the yellow ginkos that seem to leap from the branch a few at a time, without regard for our schedule; the tannin smell of oaks that range from yellow to subdued maroon to deep brown is so intense as to be almost erotic. Big heart-shaped catalpa leaves and the trees' long fibrous pods are awe and engineer-inspiring. The purple beech, the yellow basswood - oh, this is one great place for trees and kids and neighbors.
When the children track or the wind blows a few leaves into the house, I am loathe to consider them trash. When my daughters were small they would collect the "best" ones and store them between paper for art projects, or just put them in a paper bag to play with later. I will be doing the same thing with my grandBaby, who is a little young for crafts, but who will love to have a bag of leaves for his indoor tent at Grandma's some cold rainy day.
His brilliant mother found a basket of assorted gourds at the farmer's market for three dollars; she brought them home and washed them, and they have joined the blocks and dump truck in on the play rug. GrandBaby loves them, and knows they are something special, though just what and just why is yet to be appreciated - but the colors, shapes, sound of the bounce and rattle, and the different textures of the shells, well!
The sunflowers drooping and drying in the garden are attracting squirrels who compete with the birds, so a couple have come indoors to be used later in the season - but tiny fingers pluck the seeds out and try to poke them back in; this is damage that can be done without scolding, and I hope someday will be remembered as a Good Time with Grandma. GrandBaby and I have been picking pods of milkweed and other drying plants to put into arrangements with the wild asters that grow in the alleyways above the Mississippi. I get help scraping seeds out of the squash I bake for dinner, and more help taking the seeds outdoors for the beasts and birds attracted by our sheltered sward.
My own grandfather and my mother were gardeners, and loving to be with them I loved to be out in the garden, too. Among my best early memories are standing in the autumn garden with my then-twenty-something mother, picking pods of Kentucky Wonder pole beans, splitting the dry pods and feeling the silk inside - the scent of those split beans is a lovely thing to remember when I am feeling low. My grandfather was strict about the kohlrabi and raspberries I loved to pick, insisted on moderation in thinning the carrots, but allowed me to pick as many blue and pink Bachelor's Buttons for bouquets as I wanted. No garden is a garden without good beans and Bachelor's Buttons.
And a grandparent or two helps make it perfect. I hope grandBaby will not remember that "Gamga say, 'no no' " but that we walked and dug and plucked and watered and had a great time with outdoor loot. Maybe not at the conscious level, but deep in his heart and nose and culinary palate. I believe this experience of the growing world is important to learning - and to truly feeling - love and respect for the natural world upon which our lives depend. And the memories of this shared joy are wonderful places for the spirit to find solace when life is difficult or losses multiply.
Get busy making cherishable memories of our planetary home (and of ourselves, too). There's no time to spare: the leaves are falling!