A Lighter View
Autumn falls
By K.E.H. Stagg

Sept. 24, 2009

Because fall is the time for homecoming and festivals, it’s no surprise that my own thoughts turn back in time during this week’s official kick-off to the season.

One of my earliest memories of autumn is my grandmother raking leaves into piles that my cousins and I gleefully attacked, scattering them only for Grandma to gather them up again. I don’t know why we jumped in her leaf piles. I mean, we’d watched Grandma painstakingly collecting them from the farthest reaches of the property—probably not more than a half acre, although it seemed vast to us children—and that was no small job.

Or we climbed the apple tree at the far end of the back yard, hanging upside-down like monkeys from the lowest branches, littering the ground below with rotting fruit that, again, Grandma had to clean up. It’s a wonder she didn’t send us out to play in traffic for all the extra work we caused her!

Another favorite fall memory was sitting on the back seat of my mom’s bicycle. I can distinctly picture the pointy end of Mom’s scarf flapping in front of me, in those pre-helmet law days. When Mom took a spill on loose gravel, my astonished exclamation, “Mom, you let me fall!” made its way into family lore because I seemed to miss the fact that she fell too. And I’m sure she suffered lots more scrapes and bruises than I did in my cushioned seat!

A less pleasant fall memory is that of tripping in a parking lot while carrying a glass cider jar and ending up with stitches to close the gaping wound in my finger where I encountered the shattered jar a little too closely. That memory flooded back this week during a chance encounter with a paper shredder at work--

The biggest chore that loomed each autumn was planning my Halloween costume and then trying to figure out all of my little friends’ outfits. We didn’t buy our garb; our moms scrounged from old bridesmaids dresses and our dads’ closets to come up with a princess outfit or hobo’s attire. I remember the year a younger cousin showed up in dyed green longjohns. I met him at the front door, demanding, “Who are you supposed to be? You’re wearing underwear!” My mom gave me what my sisters and I termed “the hairy eyeball.” I learned my cousin was the Jolly Green Giant—just before being banished to my room for the remainder of trick-or-treating.

It’s been many years since I collected candy from strangers (which my parents first previewed in case of sharp objects concealed in popcorn balls like a friend’s aunt’s hairdresser’s niece-in-law’s stepson found in his bag of goodies), but I still enjoy watching the costumed kiddies parade down Baltimore Street, imagining themselves as the fairy tale creatures they’re dressed as.

Fall is chock full of simple pleasures, and I intend to enjoy every single one!