Autumn is wonderful.
The leaves changing colors, air as crisp as an apple, cool mornings that wrap the river bottoms in fog like a blanket in a crib.
It’s a gorgeous time to be alive.
But since I was a kid, I’ve had a nagging melancholy every fall.
The beautiful weather and the comfortable temperatures mask the sadness of a transition that’s only weeks away.
Those who look for the working hand of a higher power can find it in Nature and the lessons it teaches us.
If we’re fortunate, we go through the same cycle as a calendar - enjoying spring and summer and then finding ourselves in autumn, looking back reflectively on how we’ve spent our time and the good that might have come from it.
But just as surely as leaves turn from brown to gold, then fall from the tree, we know that our winter isn’t far away.
For winter brings a reckoning of its own. Stripped of its covering, there is nothing in nature that is hidden. All is bare.
It’s the same for us.
When winter falls on us, our lives and deeds are left to tell stories of their own.
The sadness comes from knowing that we have reached the end.
There are no more opportunities to correct wrongs, no chances to do the good that we might have wanted.
Winter is the end of the year. It’s over, and that’s inescapably sad.
But fortunately, nature also teaches us that each end leads to a new beginning.
The bare trees of winter will bud again, the lilies that bloomed in the spring and wilted in the summer will sprout again.
Life will start all over.
Babies will be born who’ll learn the same lessons we have, and we hope their world will be better in some way because of us.
Ice will melt in the mountains and turn into rivers, grass will grow, people will fall in love, tornadoes will come again in the spring.
Looking back at the cycles that have repeated since man began marking time, it’s hard not to realize we aren’t quite as important as we sometimes think.
These days, as I stand in my own autumn and look back at spring and summer, I find myself hoping that I haven’t been wasting my time, that I have made good use of the days and years I have been given.