Friday Frivolity no. 11: Falling for Fall

No season more quintessentially becomes New England than autumn.

This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a moodboard, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.

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Falling for Fall

@chrisschoenbohm on Flickr

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—

—Emily Dickinson

Autumn has arrived early this year, and I confess it has always been my least favorite season. I am used to summer tenanting New England for only a short lease—indeed, this “summer’s lease” really did have “all too short a date”—and then it is gloomy to have to pack away one’s games and gambols and shut oneself up in dreariness and routine, to stay indoors as the evenings lengthen and the darkness draws in upon the windowpanes, to wait for the decline of the year and count up one’s scattered and tattered resolutions—in short, to quit all that is cheerful, radiant, flourishing, and warm for what is somber, dismal, barren, and cold. The color orange and her drab cousin brown have never been the particular darlings of my aesthetic sense—it is the balmy robin’s-egg blue and sunlit green of spring and summer, the floral pinks and violets, that whet the appetite of my eye. Nevertheless, somehow this year I am glad for fall.

It is the passing of my father at the height of summer that makes me glad for fall. How strange, after he had died, to emerge into the world again—the world I had lain eyes on a mere couple of days earlier—and to feel that it had changed totally, that an imperceptible wind had swept through it, that its furniture had all been moved two inches to the left. When the breeze blew, the breath of Boreas joined that of Zephyr. Driving from the funeral home to the crematory, a leafy, dreamy drive, I saw bunches of leaves already rusting in the summer verdure, and I knew that summer, for me, was over. Those autumn russets and rustles were appropriate. Nature was communing with my grief. My father was missing nothing of his favorite season—the page was already turning. 

Kimon Berlin on Flickr

A couple of years ago, my family drove up to New Hampshire to go leaf-peeping. Our victim was the Kancamagus Highway, a scenic stretch along the northern portion of the state from Lincoln to Conway, meandering through the White Mountains. The draw of the “White” Mountains, of course, was that they were anything but. They rioted with color, blooming death’s springtime. From Massachusetts, we reached the Lincoln end of the highway at the base of Mt. Kancamagus, where hungry tourists milled between the few restaurants there, trying to pick their poison. Up in the mountain, a ski lodge slumbered, awaiting its season. 

We decided to take our chances at the Gypsy Café, an unassuming little place whose sign nevertheless proclaimed “food from around the world.” Indeed, the bohemian décor and kitschy mosaics brought to mind the type of people who take pleasure in calling themselves “global citizens”—but the menu really did bring together Indonesia and Italy, falafel and Philadelphia, and in a way that was (we soon found out) delicious. As my father’s sugar was running low, we started off with desert, a beautiful fudge lava cake, whose sweetness nonetheless would never match the sweetness with which my father implored me to take just one more bite. 

No season more quintessentially becomes New England than autumn. The fall foliage—flames of orange and scarlet and fulvous and bright yellow licking their way up the crests and down the valleys—is our special pride. When Dame Autumn adds an accessory—a scarf of curling mist, the brooch of a white steepled church—then you are really in for a treat. If you have some maple candy or an apple cider donut to munch on as you leaf-peep, I must declare you one of God’s chosen creatures. 

In Conway, on an otherwise desolate stretch of road, we saw two little buildings; the first was an art gallery, the second a convenience store. My father and mother always had an inclination towards local artists, but we were disappointed to find the gallery closed. At the convenience store, we learned that the artist, Robert Gordon, had passed away earlier that year. The convenience store, in fact, was displaying his paintings in the back until his posterity could sort things out. There was one of a winter landscape that caught our eye—a dark blue stream turning glassy, reflecting the last colors of autumn as it wound its way past evergreens and snowy banks. We bought it, and when people come to our house and compliment it, we tell them it was just something we picked up at a convenience store.  

Robert Gordon, Autumn Birches / Peak Season

Around this time of year, when summer is beginning to show signs of waning and autumn is starting to ascend to her place upon the throne, my father would stand at the window in the evening after work, looking a little glumly onto the darkening street or yard, his hands folded behind his back, and he would always make the same comments—how I hear him even now!—“Summer is so short,” “We have to wait so long again,” “Now it will get dark at 4:00 PM.” He disliked what he called the “wet cold” of the fall and winter months, and he quit this world just as his favorite season was lapsing away.

Last evening, I took one of my customary walks around the cemetery. The dead leaves lisped and whispered along the ground as the wind bore them on, and a kind of dark foreboding hung in the overcast sky. On a few graves, visitants had left miniature pumpkins. Statues of angels stood stark white against a backdrop of ochre and crimson. Life was moving on; time was carrying us forward, both the living and the dead. Now there was space for repose; one could gather oneself into oneself again and make a home there, sweep away the dust, make the lights glow in the windows, fill the air with the warm scent of apples and cinnamon.

I walked home under the falling leaves.

A Matter of Life and Death

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Vincent van Gogh, Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (1885): In December 1883, van Gogh, still in the Netherlands, moved to Nuenen to live with his parents, wanting a cure for his loneliness. In 1884, his father died of a heart attack, the same year he began to focus incessantly on improving his painting technique. He learned to pay greater attention to composition, and he read a book by French art theorist Charles Blanc about the way colors can be highlighted or dimmed based on their combinations. He began to realize his “sense of the infinite variety of tones in the same family,” using them to great effect here in order to capture the mood of autumn.

   

   Vincent van Gogh, Avenue of Poplar in Autumn (1884)

   Van Gogh gifted Autumn Landscape to his friend Anton Kerssemakers, who was a wealthy tanner and an amateur painter. He had become a student of van Gogh, and both would go to exhibitions together and to rural locations in order to paint. Van Gogh sometimes made adjustments to Kerssemaker’s paintings, and they even worked on a small landscape together in the spring of 1885. Kerssemaker loved “the soft, melancholy peacefulness of the combination of colors” in Autumn Landscape, but van Gogh felt he had still more to learn from the Old Masters.

2. Ralph Lauren ad from 1982: Vintage Ralph Lauren ads have been making the rounds lately as the season shifts and the more fashion-conscious among us turn to them for the endless outfit inspiration they offer. I came across some here on Substack by

   Giulia C.
   at The Inside Pocket, and they reminded me of one particular ad I always loved—the tweed jacket with its ornate fastening, the oodles of frothy lace spilling out of the front, the claret-colored velvet skirt, the Victorian sensibility. I was starting to feel a little morose at the thought of having to pack away all my floaty summer sundresses, but now I want nothing more than tweed and velvet and stockings and boots and long sleeves.

   

   

   vintage Ralph Lauren ads

3. Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel (1987): Anne of Green Gables, that Canadian classic by Lucy Maud Montgomery, is a book I have been in love with since I first read it at the age of 7; its sequels, centering around Anne first as a young woman and then as a mature writer, doctor’s wife, and mother in her very own “House of Dreams,” have followed me since and have been an equal delight. When I was a child, it was Anne’s “scope for imagination” that I loved; when I was a teenager, it was the romance between Anne and her sometime rival Gilbert that drew me back. I used to love watching the 1980s adaptations by Kevin Sullivan—the first used to come on PBS around Thanksgiving—and even though the sequel films diverge from the books, who could resist the charm of Megan Follows’ Anne and Jonathan Crombie’s Gilbert?

   

   Megan Follows as Anne Shirley and Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert Blythe

   In the sequel, Anne and Gilbert have left behind the rivalry of their schooldays to become friends, though Gilbert still harbors feelings for Anne. He proposes to her, and she rejects him, convinced they would be unhappy together. Anne accepts a new job as a teacher in the town of Kingsport, spends the school year there, learns that Gilbert has gotten engaged to another woman, and goes back to Green Gables for the summer holidays to see her friend Diana’s new baby. She learns that Gilbert has fallen ill with scarlet fever. Now on the verge of losing him forever, she finally realizes her own feelings for him and helps nurse him back to health. He recovers, tells her he has called off his engagement—as Anne is the only woman for him—proposes to her again, and she accepts, against a beautiful canvas of fall colors. “I don’t want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want you.” 

4. Home of Connecticut antiques collector Pat Guthman in House Beautiful Color, 1993: Pat Guthman helped found the Antiques Council and owned an antiques shop where she ran hearth cooking demonstrations from a fireplace with a beehive oven made of 18th-century bricks. She passed away in 2002. In her home, she added old-fashioned architectural details to match the age of her furnishings, and I love the simplicity of this archway and the two chairs on either side—it looks very cozy without being cluttered.

5. Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada (2006): In this movie, aspiring journalist Andy Sachs, newly arrived in NYC, is hired as an assistant to the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, the imperious Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, in a fantastic performance). Although Andy starts out with little more than contempt for the fashion industry—and a lack of style to match—she enlists the magazine’s art director, Nigel (played wonderfully by Stanley Tucci), to help her out. He does, and many of her outfits are iconic to this day. Near the end of the movie, she goes to Paris, and I love this beautiful dress and bolero she wears there, accessorized with black gloves and red lipstick—elegantly 1950s-ish, but still chic and modern. The perfect outfit for throwing your work phone into a fountain.

   

   Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

6. Interior from Osborne and Little: The Decorated Room by Lorraine Johnson and Gabrielle Townsend (1988): This book of interior design inspiration features the English manufacturer Osborne & Little, which was established in 1968 in the heart of Swinging London by Sir Peter Osborne and his brother-in-law Anthony Little. They took inspiration from classic designs—the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, for example—and historical references in order to create fabrics, wallpapers, and furnishings. “We believe that imagination is a key element in interior design…. It is that inspiration which lifts the decoration of a room above the merely mundane to become unique and stunning,” writes Anthony Little in the book’s foreword. 

7. George Barbier, Sortilèges, for the Gazette du Bon Ton, 1922: The Gazette du Bon Ton was a French fashion magazine published only briefly—from 1912–1915 and 1920–1925— but it was highly influential, not least for its beautiful illustrations. It featured garments designed by the leading designers of the day (Worth, Vionnet, Lanvin), rendered wonderfully in Art Deco style by artists such as Georges Lepape, Pierre Brissaud, Guy Arnoux, and of course George Barbier, the leader of a group from the École des Beaux Arts nicknamed “The Knights of the Bracelet” for their dedication to dress. Barbier not only illustrated, he also designed wallpaper, costumes, glass objects, and jewelry, and he even wrote several articles for the Gazette.

   

   The Gazette’s illustrations were completed with a stenciling technique called pochoir, popular in the 1920s and 30s. At the time, machine printing resulted in poor-quality color reproductions; pochoir involved the hand application of layers pigment to create vivid, intense, detailed prints in limited edition. The pochoirs of George Barbier are still highly sought today.

8. Magali (Béatrice Romand) and Rosine (Alexia Portal) in Autumn Tale (1998): Éric Rohmer is a director whose films are often associated with the hazy laziness of a European summer, but Autumn Tale shows him perfectly proficient at capturing the more mellow gold and muted hues of the harvest season. I wrote about Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons in a Substack essay in April—who knew that September would be upon us so soon?

   Seasons of Beauty, Tales of Life

   

   Autumn Tale (1998)

9. Edward Hopper, Interior (Model Reading) (1925): Edward Hopper was an American painter known for his representations of isolation in midcentury America. He married Josephine “Jo” Nivison, also a painter, in 1924, and they went out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to look for inspiration. However, they had no car, and so the inspiration often came from moments alone in their sparsely decorated hotel room. I love how this painting depicts not the loneliness or isolation Hopper is so recognized for but its more peaceful, more content twin: solitude. Josephine’s repose is not that voyeuristic, spied-upon, posing-for-an-unseen-admirer repose in which male artists frequently depict female subjects. Instead, Hopper captures what Josephine described as having found often in books: “inner gladness.”

3 Things I’m in Love With This Week

Fall Edition

1. Apple Cider Donuts: When fall comes around, I finally get the opportunity to re-indulge in my obsession with apple cider donuts. Warm, appley, cinnamony, sweet—how can you possibly resist? The best I’ve had was at Apple Fest in Ithaca, NY, but Alex the Cider Donut Reviewer (@ciderdonuteur) on Instagram has made a very handy map of where you can get both fresh and pre-made apple cider donuts across New England. He also reviews these donuts (and fall foods) on his Instagram page. 

   

   apple cider donuts photographed by madichan on flickr

2. Over the Garden Wall: I was introduced to this adorable animated miniseries by one of my friends, and so it will always be associated in my mind with the lovely memory of watching it with her. The series centers around two half-brothers, Wirt and Greg—Wirt wears a strange sort of Halloween costume, while Greg, who is younger, adorably perches an upside-down teapot on his head. They become lost in a strange and spooky forest and run into a bunch of odd characters, resulting in a cavalcade of misadventures, as they try to make their way home. The fairytale atmosphere is cozy, the autumnal visuals wonderful, and the cuteness of Greg irresistible. 

Over the Garden Wall (2014)

3. “To Autumn” by John Keats: Keats’ ode “To Autumn” is one of the most anthologized poems in the English language, one of the most widely disseminated, one of the most well-known—and yet, for all that, it never loses its charms or perfections for me. It is a poem I always delight in rereading, even if my last reading of it was a mere five minutes ago, and it is a poem I always take a special delight in returning to at the beginning of the fall season. The last of Keats’ great odes, it is the pinnacle of his literary achievement—and a sad foreshadowing of the year of sickness that was to follow, resulting in the poet’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 25.

   

   Joseph Severn, John Keats (1821-1823)

   I am forever grateful that Keats left behind not only his poems but also his letters—they often provide insight into his inspiration and state of mind leading up to the composition of a poem. After writing one of the finest poems in English, Keats casually jotted off this note to his friend John Reynolds: “How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never liked stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my Sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.”¹ How fascinating to see “stubble-plains” make its way into the actual poem, as well as the comparison to spring: “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—” Indeed, Autumn does have its music—Keats has given it its music—and it is a beautiful music.

Words of Wisdom

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.

— Henry Miller

Poetry Corner

Fall, leaves, fall

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

—Emily Brontë

In this poem, Brontë commands the leaves to fall and the flowers to die, for the night to lengthen and day shorten, so that autumn and winter might be ushered in, celebrating its “drearier” beauty over the more obvious beauties of spring and summer. I love the image of “wreaths of snow” (replacing the expected wreaths of roses) and how Brontë returns to the “away/day” rhyme at the end of the poem in “decay/day.” 

Orange Fall by stanzim on flickr

Beauty Tip

Cozy up with a favorite book or movie from your childhood.

Lingering Question

What is something that gives you a sense of “inner gladness,” and how might you make more time for it in the coming weeks?

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My lovely readers, thank you so much for tuning in this week! If you enjoyed, please like and subscribe to Soul-Making, and drop a comment—let me know what fall is like in your part of the world and what you like about it. I hope you have all been having a wonderful week.

1. The Letters of John Keats, Volume II, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins.