Seasonal Vertigo

"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise

would have high tide always and a full moon every night." -Hal Borland

I am in no hurry to say goodbye to summer.  Summer is long here and the nights are beautiful.  Summer is freedom and warmth.  Summer brings out the neighbors and their kids play in the park down the road and their games sound like joy given voice.  Summer smells like barbecues and rosemary and hefeweizen.  

But autumn is short here and the break from the heat is precious and invigorating.  Autumn is quiet and cozy.  In autumn we rake leaves and find that we can look up through the branches and see clouds in the sky again.  Autumn is when we take walks together and when it becomes permissible to drink hot chocolate again.  Autumn smells like apples and smoke and nutmeg.  I am looking forward to autumn. 

And so it has become tradition for me to sit down around this time of year and grapple with the psychological vertigo that I succumb to when I begin to take notice of the dark in the evenings and how school buses have emerged from memory and make their plodding way through the neighborhood.  I start to feel the dizziness when the mornings are cooler than they were just a heartbeat ago and when football season literally kicks off. 

Everyone feels the change and knows what it means.  Fall is coming.

I also succumb to the gardening cliche of buying mums in the fall.

And yet, in my non-native home of California, it is still going to top 100 degrees today.  I struggle to reconcile what my internal clock says is happening with what the nerve endings in my skin tell me: that summer is still very much here.

In America, we spend 13 of our most impressionable years in school.  More if we go to college.  By the time we find ourselves navigating our way through life in the “real world” our psyches are fused with the academic calendar.  Labor Day comes and something in us tells us that life needs to change course because we are used to going back to school after Labor Day.

I work in an office where any one day is practically indistinguishable from the last.  Though there’s something to be said for predictability, that daily sameness that I can depend upon all year suddenly seems to stand in stark opposition to the post-Labor Day feeling that my schedule is supposed to change. 

For the life of me, I can’t decide if spending time in the garden helps me cope with this disorientation or if it just makes it worse.  On one hand, I sense the subtle presence of autumn’s approach and I am gladdened by the sensation.  It is reflected in little ways like a new flush of growth in trees that seemed to sleep all summer.  

The new growth on my Acer palmatum 'koto-no-ito'
is very different than the old growth.

On the other hand, it is still too hot for me to safely move those same trees to new locations in the garden and I feel frustration and impatience rise up in me as I am forced to wait for the kinder days ahead.

I wonder if I will ever find my equilibrium in these times of transition.  In a couple years my daughter will start school and we will surely find our movements in perfect step with the rhythm of the academic calendar again.  I suspect this will delay any progress I would have made.

So while I wait for balance to find me, I am trying to find some truism to hang my hat on that will help me frame my outlook.  I have tried to tell myself that perhaps this feeling is my new normal for this time of year.  Perhaps feeling disjointed is a more honest encounter with the not always smooth transfer of the baton from the running hands of summer to the waiting hands of autumn.  Or perhaps this dizziness is just life's effort to trip me up for a minute so I will stop and take notice of all the ineffable changes taking place in the air, in time, and in me.   

Crepe Myrtle blossoms have littered my sitting area.  But I couldn't sit here anyway because this
'Glowing Embers' Japanese maple has put on several feet of
gangly growth this summer and now stretches across my chair.