Looking for Autumn

I miss the seasons. Before I went away to college, I used to imagine what it'd be like to ride a sled, to have a white Christmas, to watch trees morph from bare to bounteous, to see those same trees lose their leaves half a year later. Many people have favorites, but I've always found it hard to choose one. Every season fills me with different emotions and varied beauty (which reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty" - see below), and I relish the change the seasons bring and represent.

Still, if I had to think of one that affected me most, I'd choose fall. Autumn arrives during my birthday month, and its palette holds some of the richest, grandest colors - red, gold, orange, yellow. Of the seasons, fall is the one that brings to mind the passing of time, the memory of what is lost, the thought of what will die. I don't necessarily enjoy these thoughts but having them stirs other thoughts of the good things that I have and that do take place.

When I read this article, I thought of two things - how much I miss autumn, and whether I could have accomplished what the writer did. I liked that he had to find the spot where the photo was taken. I've felt that before, that hunger for an answer, a piece of knowledge, a name or word. But I never had the kind of contacts the writer does and many of my own quests fell by the wayside! So it was with a sharp, vicarious pleasure that I read about his hunt for autumn.

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.