Autumnal Grace

I love the Fall. The cooler weather, fog and changing colors around here have recently brought in my favorite season. Spring is pretty, but the riot of Autumnal colors and rich, warm tones mixed with the cooling air really makes me feel like a cup of tea and a good book. Being as that this is what I do for a living, read good books and talk about them, it’s a good time of year for me, when that which I have to do and that which I really want to do meld and no library is safe.
I was born in the Fall. I wonder sometimes if this has something to do with it. All star charts aside, it wouldn’t surprise me if the season in which you first become aware of seasons, in that your own birth is celebrated, becomes special to you. For some people, the year starts in January, with the promise of new beginnings, for some its Spring with its rituals of rejuvenation. Sunbabies may worship the warmth and freedom associated with the summer months, family vacations and heat swimming up from the streets and sidewalks that loosens bones and poems and late night rambles.

Me, I’m a Fall girl, born in early September, just in time for school to start. As a kid I was an inauspicious student. A lack of discipline and a preference for thick novels scuttled all but my English classes often. I had bad habits, frankly. As a babe, I’d ather skitter round the yard chasing a red ball, or a soccer ball, or mooning about some adventure I wish I was on. As a teenager, I read trashy sci-fi novels in the leaves of my Warriner during class. Same with Algebra. I drew, I painted, I wrote notes to friends, short stories and an occasional essay. Biology homework was somehow a bit beyond me, though Fall made it fun for a while. There’s nothing like that change of season and the fruition of so many living things to get you excited about the natural world. But come winter that fades; Dickens novels do not.

Fall came late this year and its still not uncommon to head out in the fog of the morning with long sleeves and jacket to come home dragging jacket and rolling sleeves in 60 or 70 degree heat. This makes it harder to settle in, to drink tea and read books, to flee the chill for the library. But alas, the weather has changed, the fogs have come and the books beckon.

My son, a piscatory sign born in the late winter as the frosts were melting like our transported-new-parent eyes spent too much time in the warmth to use many of his long-sleeved shirts or thick winter sweaters. I think he had one. Had we still lived up North, he’d surly have had his own stadium suit – the ones that make infants look like tiny blue Michelin men. I do wonder, though, what his sense of the seasons will be, which he’ll most associate with, which he’ll love best. He spent a good part of his pre-baby hood swimming with me in the cool blue waters of the local pool. His nature seems to be as easy going and inexorable as a wave. While certain objects fuel a deep-seated and unrequited desire (the TV remote, the telephone, my cell phone,) he generally bops around the living room like a spider-monkey, butt in the air and a bit of fuzz clinging to one sticky cheek. He loves people and gatherings, and seems equally at home in my arms as in those of Jason the Argonaut – a good friend and his first babysitter. Until he gets tired and wants his Mom, that is.

After a Thanksgiving week where we spent a great deal of time together uninterrupted (and with a cold driving him into whining and fussing when often he’s smiley and giggley) I came back home from my first day of work missing him. He must have missed me too, cause he threw his little baby arms around my neck and squeezed. After changing clothes into my sweat pants, we clambered round the floor together for a bit, laying out on the rug and playing with his toys and books. I hope he’ll feel the same way about his books, come Autumn, that his father and I do. But looking forward to his first Christmas, I have to admit that he might have been endowed with other gifts.