Copyright © 2006 Erin Tuttle. All rights reserved.
Fall is a funny time –a time of so much ending and coming darkness. I find myself sighing at the browning of the prairie grasses, the baring of branches, the breaking of summer’s heat.
When it first came, we grinned, my co-workers and I, at the air, finally crisp and breathable after a summer’s drought. The sun was still brilliant, the trees showing off their crimsons and golds against a wide blue sky. The prairie danced with the plumes of grasses and culver’s root, grasshoppers sprung forth from secret places every time we took a step, and sometimes, we would come face-to-face with the yellow-splashed body of an agriope spider, solemnly spanning her web.
We collected joe-pye weed in those days, mountain mint, ironweed, brown-eyed susans. Other seeds clung stubbornly to their stems, but joe-pye pried free at our touch. We stuffed paper sacks full of fluffy softness, lined our shelves with seeds.
Now, the days grow dark at four-thirty, and when we wade into the prairie plots, they seem brown and brittle, geese pushing their way determinedly across gray sky. Grasshoppers rarely pepper our path, and when they do, they seem sluggish and small. Branches are bare, and clouds of Starlings descend on the rushes, screaming out their bird talk and making us feel mournful and lonely. The air holds the stark promise of coming cold.
Pods, once closed, modest, hang open now, pregnant with seed. Grasses surrender their yield with only a slight tug, and the seed-heads of yellow coneflowers crumble at the touch. Asters stand tightly, determined to be on the last to burst into ripeness.
It’s as if the plants know a secret that we don’t. As if, even among all the ending and death, there is new life hidden in those little brown seeds. And we get to be among them, with our clippers and paper sacks, harvesting their investments to tuck away in out dusty corner, pull them out in the spring, like secrets, promises.