Autumn: A Parable of Life

Home again!  From Maine through the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, to the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills of New York, and through the Poconos of Pennsylvania,  the foliage is beginning to show the colors of autumn.  The golden rod and the sumac trees along the roadside were sure signs of this seasonal change.  Autumn, a fact of nature, is also a parable of human life.   Samuel Johnson, at the age of forty wrote, “Vernal flowers, however beautiful and gay, are only intended by nature as preparatives to autumn fruits.”  

Everything experienced, discovered, learned, and felt in earlier years are but “preparatives" for our present autumn of life.  There is an autumn for us at forty years of age just as there is an autumn for us at seventy or eighty years.  All the previous years of living (vernal blooms of all sorts—and remember a rose is not without its thorns and we’ve all been pricked a time or two) have prepared us for whatever may be our present autumn.  Our foliage may be changing colors—our hair, if we still have any, has turned grey and our physical abilities and attractiveness may be waning, but our past is filled with “vernal flowers” of experiences, discoveries, learnings and feelings that were meant to produce autumn fruits.  Autumn (at whatever age) is a time of harvesting that fruit, of allowing all that has been experienced, discovered, learned and felt to shape the present moment.

I didn’t want to be a grumpy old man at age forty and I don’t want to be a grumpy old man at three score and twenty plus 4!  I don’t want to spend my autumnal days complaining.  I don’t want to be a whiner.  I don’t want to be living in the past when my vernal flowers were blooming.  I want to live with all those flowers of the past being “preparatives” that have produced the fruit for my living now.

Who can deny that a spring bouquet of daffodils or roses make a beautiful sight?  But, may I suggest that an autumnal bouquet of oak, maple, and sumac leaves, along with a golden rod or two is just as beautiful and meaningful!  Hal Borland wrote, “Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life.”