“But when fall comes, kicking summer out ... as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
— Stephen King, “Salem’s Lot”
Autumn is getting comfy as it begins its enchanting annual residence.
With apologies to allergy sufferers, the season, with its cool mornings giving way to divinely warm mid-days and the aroma of pumpkin spice seemingly everywhere, is just the revitalizing tonic we need after being left a bit languid by the hot, dry summer.
Of course, COVID-19 continues to exert its viral influence on the feasibility and functioning of normal activity. In our Fallapalooza listing (see Page 36), we present many of the opportunities to take advantage of this time of year. There might be no high school football games or in-person concerts to attend, but we’ve shown how other sports are managing to make competitions (see Page 46) and where to get your jam on with livestreamed music (see Page 17).
Apple picking, pumpkin patching and fall festing go on — in modified form — as does open-air dining at Hinsdale restaurants, a real treat knowing how much indoor hibernating lies ahead.
In her celebrate novel “Persuasion,” Jane Austen describes autumn as “that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
The season has certainly drawn a lot of memorable efforts throughout history to capture its essence. Perhaps you have your own musings. Here are a few to tickle your acorns.
• “There is a time in the last few days of summer when the ripeness of autumn fills the air.” — American author Rudolfo Anaya
• “Autumn’s the mellow time.” — Irish poet William Allingham
• “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” — George Eliot (pen name for British writer Mary Ann Evans)
• “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” — French philosopher and writer Albert Camus
• “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.” — American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” — British humorist PG Wodehouse in “Jeeves and the Old School Chum”
• “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.” — American journalist Jim Bishop
