O! what a fall is here

This is why we endure winter -- with its sunlight like thin, cloudy gruel fit for inmates at a Soviet work camp. We don't suffer through it for the spring, when the sun first starts to tease us. We don't do it for summer, when the sun burns the skin to a red crisp. Here in St. Peter, it is for autumn that we suffer. Only autumn brings us October light.

And though the sun is moving away from us, its light, at this time of year, seems especially bright, warm and radiant. Slanted at a 45-degree angle, it gently rubs against the southwest horizon. It filters through the atmosphere -- thick with the golden dust of the harvest. It is like a mist of sweet honey that lightly coats everything it touches.

I imagine it aged like wine in a dark green bottle of hot humid air, all summer long. And now in late October, we finally get to pop the cork and tip the bottle, letting that light flow out. As it pours, it slowly stains everything into these beautiful autumn colors, red, yellow, orange and brown.

Autumn gives us all this, and almost at the same time takes it away. For that, it is the most honest of the seasons. It doesn't pretend to be anything it's not. It's about reaping and not sowing, endings rather than beginnings. It's about shortening days and long, cold nights. Here in the river valley, all the bright fall leaves are already mostly blown down, and the eastern bluffs are already fading into an ashy, copper brown.

So let's raise a glass and toast this fall and its light. We've patiently endured long enough and I think we deserve it. So Skoal! To the fall and to the light!

----

Philip Bryant is a professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College.

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