A Walker in the Suburbs

It was late coming, but the last few days of autumn have fulfilled their promise with splashes of last-minute color, with that trademark smell of crushed leaves and with the sound of motors — leaf blowers, chainsaws, lawn mowers.

From its shivery beginning to its balmy conclusion, yesterday was designed to show off what’s left of the reds and yellows and those translucent pinky oranges that always stand out in the woods.

I took my camera out for a walk and it got more exercise than I did. Every few paces I was snapping shots again.

I’m glad to have this record of my stroll. And glad, too, to have these brilliant days of fall before winter makes us monochrome once more.

Autumn moves slowly, which is fine with me. In the woods, the poison ivy flames red against the tree trunks. In our yard, leaves flail and fall and lodge themselves against the fence posts. For some reason, long-dormant potted pepper seeds finally sprout and flower. I may bring the plant in, see if it will bear fruit in January.

As the light fades, we seek body heat, the closeness of each other. (As I write, Copper curls up beside me.) I think, as I walk, about those who once lived more openly on the land, how busy they would be this season, chopping wood, canning fruit, patching cracks.

Here in our suburban haven, I muse about the coming of the cold. So far, so good. Our windows are still open; they don’t yet rattle in the wind. We are suspended in a mellow transition.

The cool nights and warm days of the equinox mean we need neither heating nor air-conditioning, and the air flows freely in and out of the house. The windows are open (or as open as the stink bugs will allow) and what is inside the house is also outside.

I sit now beside an open window, listening to the acorns fall, thinking about the walls that separate us from the outdoors.

This is the time of year I turn my attention to neglected household chores. (If my family reads they will think, really? hmmm…) But even if I don’t complete the task — even if the old curtains and the cluttered basement remain — that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about sweeping the house clean, freshening up the place, even painting.

At least the windows are open. If nothing else our house is being invisibly scoured by the low-humidity air of fall. It is a time of equilibrium; we are open to the air around us.

It has been a busy weekend, and preparing for a lunch guest today shortened my morning walk. I made up for it with a stroll later on.

This evening’s amble was full of cricket chirps, the teasing outline of a faint, almost-full moon and the slight scent of wood smoke. It has been warm but the thin air and the turning leaves are clear signs of the season.

As I neared home I passed an abandoned horse pasture. Some fence panels are broken and the grass is high. My eye flickered over the scene, looking for something, I’m not sure what. It was as I looked again at the path that I caught from a corner of my eye a glint of gold. Was it a butterfly come to visit us once more? Nothing of the kind. It was a yellow leaf fluttering slowly to the ground.

This morning I notice the stillness. In the fog of a new day, I hear what has become mere background noise, the fluid chorus of chirping crickets, which passes for silence this time of year.

“By September, the day breaks with little help from birds,” writes the conservationist Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold’s line makes me notice the truth: The day dawns quietly now, without the raucous morning chorus of cardinals and robins and jays. “The disappointment I feel on these mornings of silence perhaps shows that things hoped for have a higher value than things assured,” Leopold writes, explaining how he feels on days he does not hear a covey of quail.

I am not disappointed by the lack of bird call, but I am made pensive by it. There is something in the dawn chorus that does my heart good. Birds are onto something; they sense hazards before we do. When they quiet down, I listen up.

Last week we were so distracted by an earthquake and a hurricane that we missed the main story, which is that summer is ending. Already the mornings are late and cool, and by 8 o’clock in the evening it’s almost dark. Many schools are in session and those that aren’t (like ours) will be next week.

The thing about summer is that it leads you on. In the midst of July you think the heat and humidity, the late nights and early mornings, will always be here. Summer is about limitlessness, about burning the candle at both ends. It is a forgiving season, an easy season. My hair looks better in the summer, too.

So even though I may write posts about the fresh beginnings of fall, the cool, energizing air, the first crisp blank page of a new notebook, there will be some bravado there, some feigned cheer. Because underneath, I will be missing summer.

The hottest days of the summer drive us indoors, where a winter mentality is lurking. Clean the basement, organize a closet. This is what I should be doing today.

Instead, I want to lie in the hammock with a good book and let torpor overtake me. It’s not yet 3. There is enough day left to do both.

The hydrangea wilts, the hammock waits, the cicadas hum. It is midsummer in Virginia, a sizzling hot day on tap, 101 before it’s all over, they say.

I remember other scalding summers, cooling off on the Staten Island ferry in Manhattan, the feeble breeze of a single fan in a shotgun apartment in Lexington, the blistering pavement of Chicago in July (which seemed unfair given how frigid it had been the previous winter), our long honeymoon summer on Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas. It was so humid all the envelopes sealed themselves.

When I think back on the hot days, the misery does not translate. What remains is a sense of life fully lived.