It’s that time of year again. The scorch of summer has taken its crisp dive into fall mornings with a sharp wind chill, framed in the flurrying of leaves. It’s a scenic shift, especially here in Providence. Fallen leaves crunch underfoot, scattering the cobbled brick sidewalks and piling at street corners. Trees stand proudly above, shaded over in blushing reds, deep oranges, and lofty shades of bright yellow. This is my first autumn in Providence, and the season has not disappointed.
But beyond nature’s flourishing spectrum of color and the newly bittered brush of wind, fall also brings something else. Whether it’s in New England or down south in Atlanta where I grew up when autumn arrives, I can’t help it: I’m overwhelmed with waves of nostalgia, a recurring sense of awareness and yet distance from myself, tinted in melancholy.
First, this feeling surrounds tangible things: the bucolic idea of plucking an apple from an orchard, the gentle squeeze of a beanie, the soft brush of a scarf. An assortment of food-associations rush by as quickly as the wind: apple pie, apple tarts, apple cider, apple cider donuts, and then the pumpkin breads and pies and inevitable lattes, the carving of a Thanksgiving turkey between bites of bready stuffing, a thick pot of gravy, a questionable casserole of green beans, scents of cardamom and cinnamon.
Or maybe it’s the colors, which match the changing leaves overhead. Fall arrives with an embracing warmth, everything in glowing oranges and reds. Crimson-checkered scarves and flannels intersperse with jackets in umber and tawny yellow, sweeping trench coats in a buttery light brown.
The rituals of the season return year after year, to the delight of most everyone, including me. They become salient in the way that languid summer evenings or sweaty afternoons, swaths of time spent under the same leaves, but green, could not.
This is how fall tracks the passage of time: with the bustling first days of school from younger times (and perhaps the mid-semester woes of current ones), but also with the return of familiar images and colors which brush the world in another layer of paint. “This year has come and gone,” the vestments of fall tell us. And we have returned to live through another one. It is both a congratulations and a startling reminder that yes, we are growing and aging. Time is slipping beneath our feet, trodden like those fallen leaves.
And imbued in these traditions, of course, are the memories of years before, and the understanding that they now rest beyond the veil of the past. I’ll never sit at the Thanksgiving table quite as I did at age eight, unearthing the delightful gem of a sweet potato biscuit from beneath a cloth napkin. I’ll never leap into a leaf pile without complaining about how such things didn’t hurt as a kid, or stand at the window on Halloween, counting down the moments until it was time to trick-or-treat, or enter high school on a breezy day at the tapering end of summer, with the promise of a new season cupped in my hand like a perfect secret. Even if these traditions remain the same with each turn of the year toward October and November—I can’t.
This is my nostalgia: a recursive awareness of seasons past and the versions of myself I have left behind. The girl who crosses the pumpkin patch today is not the girl who frolicked five or ten years ago. The fall season, steadfast in its arrivals, is also steadfast in how it reveals our growth and requires us to confront it.
But maybe that’s just it: if I lived through all of those seasons—and I did— then I grew. I shed and reinvented and rediscovered myself until I made myself into the girl walking in this pumpkin patch. With the rush of changes in nature, I can see in relief how much I have transformed, or how I’ve stayed constant. Maybe nostalgia was never the right word. Maybe what fall offers us, each year is a simple appreciation of how far we’ve come.
So while you’re eating a slice of apple pie, or watching the leaves drop, or sharing a picnic under blankets on the quad, remember all of the falls you’ve lived to get here, and how proud your past selves must be.