Fall Melancholy

 

The elementary culinary foundations

of sweet and sour so vital to our taste

receptors in enjoying food appealing to us

have their counterpart in our emotions as

in the sweet nostalgia that sweeps over us

as adults swishing through layers of dried

leaves in the fall calling up memories of

childhood, the warmth of family of our

enjoyment of the seasons in the vast and

endless discoveries of life. But then this 

is also a time when as adults we see and 

feel the passage of time and treasure the

warm leisure of summer, dreading the onset

of winter and are overcome with a sense of

sadness in the metaphor that autumn suggests

as our forlorn gardens, dredged of their

colour accents as plants are uprooted and

discarded and others cut back, we view the

dismantling with profound sadness. Yet our

agedness is forgotten in the pleasure of digging

deep in the warm, moist soil not yet in frost

evoking earlier memories of the fragrance

and the promise of the garden to return.