It was a Saturday in the early fall, as I recall. There was a bit of a chill in the air – a friendly one, not the angry kind that would come whipping out of the north in a month or two – as I cruised with my window down along Highway 20 between Ashton and Island Park. A few specks of gold and red were starting to pepper the green and brown of the mountain’s maple- and aspen-covered south face. Dust rose from the spud harvesters scattered across the valley. Just off the highway, three cowboys, one on a gorgeous big palomino, looked to be sorting the heifers from their main cow herd. Up in the impossibly blue sky, a bunch of southbound trumpeter swans let out their mournful, joyous cries.
Now, this was a few years ago, and I don’t remember where I was headed or for what reason. It was just one of those moments where the things a guy sees and feels inexplicably stick with him. It was nothing more or less than a glorious fall day, the kind that makes even the most devout atheist question his devotion to his doctrine. Simple and perfect.
I love the fall. It brings hints of change without the shock of immediate, wholesale transformation. Like a well-written sitcom (emphasis on “well-written”; sorry, Friends fans), a perfectly executed autumn allows for a natural-feeling, equinox-driven character development of the seasons.
Alas, in my part of the world, autumntime isn’t always the gentle descent toward winter I expect in my most idealistic moments. Most years, it’s a little jarring. Even if the snow hasn’t flown yet, the last couple games of the high school football season are often played on dead grass barely clinging to dirt turned to concrete by the cold nights. Straw hats and knee-length chinks are put on the shelf, shotgun chaps and woolen Stormy Kromer caps taking their place in cowboys’ daily ensembles. Farmers walk the razor’s edge between letting their sugarbeets bulk up another couple days and risking having to leave them in the frozen earth, understanding full well that sunny and 72ºF could morph into driven sleet and 27ºF tomorrow in a matter of hours. Mother Nature routinely forces more cowmen than like to admit it to start feeding a week or two earlier than their math suggests is wise.
Either way, whether fall plays a starring role in your year or only makes a brief cameo, my suggestion is to drink it in.
Maybe your life or business has at some point required some sort of abrupt turnaround. Maybe you’re in need of it now. More likely, though, your path has been and will continue to be one of gradual evolution rather than of radical metamorphosis. Like the autumn season, things in life might not always develop at the pace we’d prefer.
It’s easy (for me, at least) to lament the shorter days and cooler nights that hint at the coming winter. Whether this particular season of your life calls for taking change as it comes or being a driver of it, here’s a reminder that change can and ought to be good.
