These Precious Days I’ll Spend With You

The shifting angle of the sun is shrinking the days. Walter Huston described the season in Kurt Weill’s September Song, singing about the autumn weather turning the leaves to flame, a more poetic take on the release of anthocyanin, a metabolite which releases nitrogen from the dying leaves back into the body of the tree.

It’s time to turn back the clock and sleep an hour later. It’s also time to head south with the V formations of Canadian geese, honking overhead. I have nothing against leafing season. Busloads of leaf peepers travel miles to see for themselves the vibrant magentas and oranges of Vermont’s dead and dying maple leaves. I wonder what they would say if they saw the giant herb of a banana plant in my backyard, its whorl of leaves curled and shredded after a hurricane, as dead as any maple leaf, revived like Lazarus before the insurance claim was filed.

We used to return home before Labor Day while I was still on an academic calendar. Now, as free as the Canadian geese, I am suddenly and overwhelmingly homesick for what author Henry James described as Florida’s “velvet air.”

Read the entire article in the September 2009 issue