Michelle Dutton
Dr. Koch
ENG 380
13 November 2011
Autumn: The Season of Beautiful Death
My fingers turned painful with cold around the wooden handle of the rake, tugging the
bright red claws across the lawn. We were gathering a harvest of dead leaves. My dad hauled a
huge, dirty plastic blue sheet laden with brown, red, and yellow down to the curb, leaving five
giant mounds of leaves to wait expectantly next to our mailbox at our old house in Ohio. He was
relieved when we moved to the treeless prairie lands of Illinois because he no longer had to rake.
I missed the trees, but perhaps that was because I didn’t do most of the raking. Maybe if I had
spent less time climbing them and more time picking up after them, I would have resented the
trees and their resulting leaf piles as much as I hated the cold.
I always regarded autumn with a wary eye because its arrival signaled the coming of
winter. Throughout my childhood, I dreaded trudging through the unavoidably bitter
temperatures that would follow the change of seasons. Sure, the autumnal colors of the leaves
were sort of pretty, but the wind was chilly, Halloween was terrifying, and cold rain seeped
through my sweaters and socks like droplets of fear. Although some of these feelings linger, I
have noticed a subtle change in my attitude towards fall. Beginning this year, I started seeing
more beauty in autumn. The trees showed off their vivid foliage like giant runway models, and I
couldn’t get enough of the azure sky. I didn’t resent the change in the weather as much after I
building up a tolerance for colder temperatures. Through going to college and being outside a lot,
I had regained a second childhood; I began rediscovering the wonders of fall.
Even though I feel like I’ve reawakened some of my childhood characteristics, I haven’t
had the opportunity to jump in a leaf-pile in ages. Most days after our elementary school let out,
my best friend Nat and I would cannonball into the earthy-smelling pile of decaying life that
somehow invigorated us. The cold wind reddened our cheeks, and our breath gushed out in
plumes, taking the form of beautiful white vapors that looked like heavenly smoke billowing out
from our mouths. As a girl, I imagined I was smoking a cigarette, being cool, but as I got older I
discovered just how awful the effects of smoking truly were. Time and pain, experience and
maturity made this childish notion fall from me like a dead leaf from a many-ringed oak tree.
Autumn often represents maturity and adulthood in the figurative and literary world,
since spring represents the beginning of life and winter symbolizes death. Famous literary critic
Northrup Frye says that autumn generally stands for “mortality and melancholy and the mode of
tragedy” in literature (“Books”). I have found this to be true in the international and American
poetry that I have studied. Thus, it can be said that people around the world regard autumn as
being heavy with sadness and death. The U.S. custom of Halloween reflects this idea as well.
Many of my girlhood Halloweens were overshadowed by a terrifying stuffed dummy
that my made every year. He set it up on our front porch a few weeks before the arrival of trickor-treaters. Using old newspaper, he stuffed a pair of pants, brown working boots, tough garden
gloves and a red plaid shirt to make the life-size “body.” This he topped off with a horrible
Frankenstein/Lurch mask that had pale yellowing skin, dark plastered hair, and a glazed stare.
Whenever I approached my house during this Time of the Dummy, I avoided so much as looking
at my front porch. Instead, I made a wild dash around the side of the house to go through the
back door and enter without the monster “seeing me.” It took many years for me to resist the
pang of fear that suddenly squeezed my heart when I saw the fake man sitting there, looking out
spookily from puffy, drowned eyes. There was a time when the mask still frightened my younger
brother, too, but now both of us are brave in the face of the terror.
I’ve grown up and shed my fears about Halloween for the most part. This year, to teach
my Bible study about how Halloween (All Hallows Eve) connects to Catholicism, I decided to
do some investigating. The ghoulish tradition that is now celebrated in the U.S. began sometime
around the year 5 B.C. The ancient Celts from present-day Ireland, Brittany, Scotland, and Wales
believed that on October 31st, the night before the first day of their new year, the Lord of the
Dead returned to earth. In order to defend themselves against him and other evil spirits, the
people wore masks and danced around bonfires. Our contemporary wicked witches, sexy devils,
shimmering fairies, and Scream outfits stem from this age-old tradition. We have forgotten the
reason for these disguises. The ancient people must have been terrified to see so much of nature
fade into oblivion during autumn; they must have thought that death would soon reach out its
heavy hand towards them as well. This fear of mortality has been passed down to us still, across
the pond in the U.S., where Halloween was brought by Irish immigrants in the 1840s.
In the United States, we hide ourselves from death even when it’s not Halloween. We
push it off, we inject collagen and botox to give our faces the illusion of youth, and we dye our
hair to hide the gray that creeps in. We are afraid to even tell people our real age; instead of
being proud of reaching a certain number of years—and the implied wisdom and experience that
such an age brings—we cover it up and lie to retain our “youth.” What would happen if the
deciduous trees did the same? If the trees of autumn stubbornly refused to turn their leaves red,
orange, and brown, they wouldn’t fall, and if they didn’t let them fall, the tree would die
(Krulwich). In a similar way, we also kill part of ourselves by denying our age, our death, and
our pain. By not submitting ourselves to the reality of our lives and our sufferings, by hiding
ourselves behind a mask, we deaden ourselves to life’s experiences and truths.
How does a tree die by keeping its leaves? To explain this, a scientific exploration must be made.
Deciduous trees cut off their leaves with an abscission layer, a group of plant cells located at the tip of the
stem that connects the leaf to the branches that is in place from the very beginning of the leaf’s existence.
The leaf merrily feeds the giant tree through the process of photosynthesis all spring and summer. Then,
as autumn gets underway, the abscission layer cuts off the leaf’s water supply. If this didn’t happen, the
leaf would try to perform photosynthesis during the winter’s occasional heat waves, and then the
following cold snap would cause water in the leaf’s veins to freeze. The frozen water would kill the leaf,
and the tree would be left with only dead leaves attached to it. With no way to perform photosynthesis in
the spring, the tree would die. Thus, this self-pruning process is essential to the tree’s survival, however
painful it might seem to the human observer.
The American author John Burroughs writes, “How beautifully the leaves grow old. How full of
light and color are their last days.” As the leaf’s green chlorophyll disappears due to a lack of water, the
latent yellow and orange colors start to stand out. Trapped glucose results in the gorgeous reds and
purples we see. Finally, the leaf turns brown because of a bitter waste product called tannin. The leaf dies
and falls sometime amidst the colorful spectrum of yellow, orange, red, purple, and brown. This requisite
process kills the leaf while simultaneously making it spectacular and beautiful.
Humanity would do well to learn from the leaf’s example. Maturity and growing old is
not all bad; change is requisite for human growth, and it can even have ultimately pleasing
results. Fall in the United States is bursting with the bounty of the season, which includes a new
school year, fun hayrides, rich friendships, caramel apples, plump pumpkins, and family
reunions. Autumn explodes with produce, as reinforced by the pre-13th century Old English word
for the season: “harvest.” The present-day word “autumn” might have roots in the word “auctus,”
which means “increase,” implying growth or ripening (Harper). It is interesting to note that there
was never a common word for this season amongst several different languages; autumn is an
elusive, many-faceted mystery to all. Despite this and perhaps because of it, fall retains its appeal
as a season and even as a namesake. Ever since 1997, “Autumn” has been among the top one
hundred most popular baby names for girls.
Speaking of the feminine, autumn is often personified visually and literarily as a woman
with fruit. Therefore, although autumn retains its symbolism as a metaphor for tragedy and loss,
it also has a more maternal and loving connotation as well. Women are often perceived as
relational beings who enjoy gathering together family and friends. Indeed, autumn seems to
mimic this by bringing people together through food and football, a.k.a. Thanksgiving in the
United States.
Although Thanksgiving is supposed to commemorate the legendary and brief moment of
cooperation and friendship between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, today it has become a
food fest that reunites generations of blood relatives and invites them to over-indulge in turkey,
stuffing, cranberry, pies, mashed potatoes, corn, and more (depending on who’s cooking). Each
year my immediate family and I gather together a harvest of people, ripe in love and struggle,
foolishness and kindness. As the name of the national holiday implies, we are summoned to
“give thanks” for whatever we have to be grateful for in life. This gratitude is perhaps the fruit
of maturity; a sense of gratitude for what has been given, and even for what has been taken away,
is the hallmark of wise. This autumnal wisdom embraces age and the fruitful experience it
produces, like so many heavy apples on a tree, perfuming the air with their scent and reviving the
tongue with its warm sweetness.
Autumn is the season of beauty and death intertwined, inalienably mixed together; it is a
mystery that only wisdom can appreciate fully. I am not ripe enough to be considered wise; I was
green during my childhood, and I still have not changed all that much in the intervening years
between the leaf piles and the Dubuque hills. I have come to understand fall a little bit more by
being surrounded by it on all sides, but beyond that I still must wait, and watch, and listen for
autumn to whisper her secrets in my ear. Until then, hand me a rake, and reacquaint me with the
cold and the harvest.
Works Cited
“Books.” Symbolism.Org. 2001. Web. 29 Oct. 2011.
<http://www.symbolism.org/writing/books/sp/4/page2.html>.
Harper, Douglas. “autumn.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2011.
<http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=autumn>.
Krulwich, Robert. “Why Leaves Really Fall Off Trees.” NPR: National Public Radio. 30 Oct.
2009. Web. 13 Nov. 2011. <
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114288700>.