Ed’s Corner

Autumn is my favorite season, and judging from my own informal polling of opinions, there is a better than 50% chance that it’s yours, too. Why it it so popular? Maybe it’s the cooler weather after a hot summer, or the fresh beginning of a new school year, or looking forward to the harvest and the holidays to come.

Then there are the smells of autumn that somehow bypass the sensory gates of our reason and are already ‘at work’ inside us – triggering memories, personal and communal, recent and ancient, earthly and ethereal – before we even know that we are smelling something. At least for me, such smells as come from the sky after a cold front has gone through, fallen leaves warmed for hours by the sun, a just-opened pumpkin, a breeze blowing gently over the ripe earth, mounds of apples, wood smoke – all these smells have the power to move me, to stir feelings and yearnings of many kinds, some of them unidentifiable. And all of this within a few seconds!

Fall also summons a sort of melancholy that seems to be lurking just around the corner, a feeling of things coming to a close, shutting down. We have less light, more cold. Things seem to be contracting, pulling in, as perhaps we are too.

At The Nature Place we encourage you not to pull in too much – get out into nature with your child. You can help each other as explorers of the natural world that you can find in your backyard or just down the block. You will connect with each other as you forge connections with the seasons and with the earth.