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QuickTake:
Of course change is inevitable. That doesn't mean it’s easy. But I’m learning to appreciate it — even when the change in question is watching another glorious Oregon summer begin to exit the stage.
Officially, autumn starts two weeks from today, Sept. 22. But for me it began the Friday of Labor Day weekend when two dozen geese flew low over our backyard.
They do this every year just for me. Like airborne town criers, they honk as if delivering the last lines of a play’s first act, a sentimental goodbye to summer and a fine-feathered foreshadowing to the season to come.
I like the segue. I am a lover of summer, but I inevitably overstuff the suitcase. Too much hiking. Too much sailing. Too much of a good thing.
My midsummer night’s lament is that I try to play the season as if it were a game of Yahtzee. I must score high in every blank, but I simply can’t do it all. I’m still beating myself up over having been off hiking the High Sierra when the Willamette Valley blackberries reached their zenith. (Last year’s blackberry shakes were stellar, and I had quietly vowed to make it a yearly ritual.)
For nearly three weeks after my return from the John Muir Trail, I dreamt every night of backpacking, unable to shake the 155-mile journey to the top of Mount Whitney. And feeling exhausted. So I look forward to the coming of fall in the way a bronc rider looks forward to the end of a ride. He chose the risky pursuit. He loves it. But the ultimate victory is in the serenity that follows success.
I’m intrigued by the changes to come. I have friends who live in San Diego, Phoenix and Fort Worth. And even though I totally understand why they chose those places, I am a man for all seasons. Oregon was made for those like me.
Our seasons are distinctive. They each have assets and liabilities, but are unique unto themselves and, thus, work against a nonending loop of sameness.
Autumn is the sentimental season, the letting-go season, the last-light-before-winter season. I welcome it even as I lament the passing of summer.
On the last day of August, in Yachats, I watched a 13-year-old grandson diligently build a circular sandcastle as an incoming tide threatened to erase his hours of work with a single surge. He clearly understood the threat but didn’t let it rattle him. Instead, he stayed on task, committed to the process.
He finished, posed as his mother took a few photos — including one of him jumping his own castle — to lock his achievement into the iPhoto Hall of Fame. Then he left to body-surf with his brothers.
Apparently no regrets, as if accepting the inevitability to come. As if understanding that you can appreciate the past without lament and still move forward at the same time — and teach your grandfather a lesson in the process.
When I was 6, my parents took me to the musical comedy, “The Fantasticks,” at Oregon State’s theater in Corvallis. I’ve never forgotten the play’s first song, “Try to Remember:”
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow
To me, it speaks of nostalgia, simplicity, youth and the passage of time. You’d think that January, the heralding of a new year, would fulfill this, but not for me. The December-to-January transition gets co-opted by Christmas, in the best of ways. But let’s face it: Winter’s change is only “calendar deep.”
December winter looks an awful lot like January winter. Mid-October is far different from mid-August — and mid-November looks nothing like it.
As I reflect on this season’s change, I reflect on personal change. I try to come to grips with the idea that change is as inevitable as night turning to day, that the world would shrivel in repetition without it, that as much as it hurts to let go, it is only then that we can grasp something new.
Henry Cloud’s book “Necessary Endings” is always a go-to of mine around this time of year.
“Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on,” he writes. “Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.”
It is the human equivalent of nature. Growth requires release. Leaves fall, nurture the earth and make way for spring’s new buds. Death and decay lead to life and spring resurgence.
Summer is always my active season. But I ultimately feel spent, with nobody to blame but my overzealous self.
Autumn, on the other hand, is nature’s active season — the leaves, of course, stealing the show. So I’m happy to relax, watch, listen and learn.
I look forward to our book club cranking up the last Monday of September, with the promise of one more on-the-back-deck meeting before we hibernate for winter.
I look forward to leafy walks to Autzen, to the sound of the pep band as I near Sheldon High’s Dennis Ludwig Stadium.
I look forward to a few quiet rounds at Tokatee, where the beautiful drive up and back is often more rewarding than the golf.
I look forward to waking up to at least a few days with nothing at all on my schedule — yes, me, the poster boy for busy-ness. This fall is my segue into what I’m hoping will, for the first time, feel like semiretirement.
Our 83-year-old neighbor Ron has begun his weekly phone calls to alert us to fresh tomatoes he’s ready to hand over the fence; in our household, September is BLT Month.
Our grandchildren take flight like the geese: one to Linfield, one to Oregon State. And beyond autumn, nothing says change like seeing your 15-year-old grandson pull up in the driveway in his family’s Honda Odyssey.
But I’m good with change. I look forward to a cleaner calendar, a slower pace, another chance to totally redeem myself and slow down.
I look forward to trick-or-treaters asking to have their photos taken with Rose, our front-porch, life-sized cow.
I look forward to one — is that too much to ask for? — serious snowfall. And to days and nights that harken back to the sentimentality of the song from “The Fantasticks:”
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember
Although you know, the snow will follow
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember
Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.
