One of the promises of autumn where we live comes when the university marching band starts practicing on the front campus up the street from us.
Time was, I’d hear the unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat of the snare drums, and I’d grab my youngest by the hand and run the five minutes to the field in front of the music building where we would take in the joy of the moment.
So much expectation: A clean slate for the football team. The start of a new college semester.
Autumn coming.
We Ohioans love our autumns, known in national fall foliage roundups for its preponderance of rich red maples and golden hickories, its purplish red aspens, its beech, ash and sweet gum. There will be the discovery of a single red leaf early in August, which both startles and delights. A crisp breeze will blow in from Lake Erie. A flock of birds gathered at the end of summer breeding time will swoop down to the backyard feeder and back up again. And autumn is on its way.
In a small college town like Kent, Ohio, the whole of the populace takes up the cue. The population more than doubles with an influx of 40,000 students. The increase in energy is palpable, as traffic in restaurants and bars and on the roads surges, as ripped-out carpet and old couches pile up in front of frat houses being made fresh for a new rabble of brotherhood. The lone Starbucks in town begins hawking pumpkin lattes as a line of cars wraps around the building.
In our family, the feeling of autumn was always multiplied by the passions of my college-professor husband, whose job transplanted us here 28 years ago.
As much as this political scientist loved the work of research and writing, it was teaching that got him revved up. Ever young at heart, he brought into the classroom a bright energy and a sardonic wit, along with a deep desire to help his students understand a complicated world.
Every autumn became a new opportunity for Steve, who won the admiration of students who helped make him teacher of the year one year. With the start of the fall semester, he’d get a tuneup for his bike and eagerly ride up the hill to campus that first week, polished syllabi tucked into his saddlebags.
One of the things Steve loved to do in the fall came at the end of a day of teaching or writing. It was a competitive game he invented called “Catch the Leaf.” The rules were elaborate, the action itself simple enough for a 5-year-old, involving catching leaves on windy days as they fell. The kids grew up reveling in this game and continued to love it into their teens and 20s when Steve would race home from work, stand on the cul-de-sac in front of the house and shout “Catch the Leaf time!”
It is the same cul-de-sac where I live alone now, abutting the same campus our three children attended for free, one of the best perks of Steve’s job, lending further connection in our family to the rhythms of local campus life.
It is the same campus from which Steve was forced to take early retirement.
His students and his family had begun noticing a persistent confusion in his behavior. A neurologist ran a battery of tests. And a few short years ago when he was 59, Steve was diagnosed with early onset frontotemporal dementia, a terminal, fast-moving disease that abruptly robbed him of his autumn routine and the rest of his life.
Autumn is no longer the same as it ever was. We see the leaves begin to turn, and we prepare for the beauty of the season, yes. We also prepare for the memories of Steve, for the call we got in the middle of a night two Septembers ago. Instead of preparing to ride up the hill on his bike like he might have been that day, Steve was in the last stages of dying.
Life is like this, don’t we know, dark and light all rolled into one, and no more evident than within the nature of fall. We especially in these northern climes know all too well what the coming of this intensely beautiful season portends. Color gives way to brown, gives way to fallen and suddenly the trees are stark limbs etching a steel great sky, and it’s bitterly cold, snowy and dark.
There is no escape.
We have no choice but to take it as it comes, light and dark, yin and yang, death and life — including in our family this fall, a new baby, expected in mid-October at the peak of fall color.
Avey, she will be called, my youngest child’s first baby, my first granddaughter.
Avey won’t know her grandfather, the man who unknowingly gifted us with the legacy of place.
She won’t see his excitement at the beginning of the school year or hear him shout “Let’s play Catch the Leaf!”
But she will know me. She will know us.
And one day, some fall day nearing her birthday, we will teach her how to catch leaves. We will hurry up the hill to watch the marching band practice.
We will bask together in the coming of autumn.
Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since 1988. She writes for Tribune News Service and may be contacted at dlbhook@yahoo.com.
TNS
