'No Gold This Go-Round'

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northen autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The trees are as green today as they were last month and last April. Butterflies still flit in the garden, as do the anoles, green and brown. Years have a circadian rhythm as do our days. Mine is definitely Northern, Ohio by way of upstate New York, and my clock is always off.

Our front yard was the deepest on the street, lined on the right with four silver maples, with a sugar maple nearest the street. All are long gone, but starting in September when I was a kid all were blazing yellow with the occasional dash of red. I remember writing a paper in which I described maples as “sugar factories.” Few maples grow in Texas. In her poem “Suburban Samsara,” Maryann Corbett, who lives in Minnesota, writes of the cycle of seasonal change and the larger cycles of life. Here is the second stanza:

“Arid, this summer. | After, when air

chilled, and the days | damped down, cheerless,

small color came: | the crabbed rust-brown,

the dull, dry green. | No gold this go-round,

wealth we waited for. | Only the work—

the raking, bent, | the wrenched back.”

Yes, hours of raking, in our yard and the neighbors’. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of life, death and rebirth, common to Buddhism and Hinduism. Every autumn, this native Northerner recalls a sentence from The American Scene (1906) by Henry James:

“[T]he way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”