When I was a kid I liked fall best, October especially, month of my birth, of crisp nights and colored leaves, of Halloween and apple cider and firewood to be split and stacked before winter. Summer was trivial, made for children and tourists, but autumn was somber, solemn, mature. It made me impatient to grow up. On windy October and November days when I was twelve years old I would stand on the shore of Long Lake and watch the year get swept away and be overwhelmed with a delicious sorrow. The season clarified me. It was sepulchral. It was elegiac. I savored its bittersweet tang.

Donald Hall writes that Michigan’s fall is like Europe’s – “burnished old gold; yellow harvest mellow with violins; Autumn of the falling fruit and the long journey toward oblivion; muted and melancholy…” – though surely he was thinking of Ann Arbor, where he once lived and taught, and not the wooded and hilly rural north, where autumn’s colors boom in operatic excess. Up here is as different from Ann Arbor as Eagle Pond is from Cambridge. But Hall is right about the melancholy, the falling fruit, and the journey toward oblivion. We have all three in abundance. Every dropped leaf, every skidding rain, every flock of geese passing overhead reminds us of winter’s approach. Were the days a movie, the soundtrack would be mostly cellos. We grow suddenly impatient and hurry outside to gather all the music and fragrance we can hold, stocking up on sensations for the sterile months ahead. If we must stay indoors we put on a kettle of water for tea, settle into a chair beside the fireplace, and open the first of the season’s thick novels. Either way, we’re digging in against oblivion…

[from "The Several Autumns," by Jerry Dennis. Originally published in Dunes Review and reprinted in Orion, and to be included in my forthcoming collection, The World at Hand: Essays in Four Seasons.]