I think I’ll blame my mother.
O.K., maybe not blame. How about attribute or credit? Or thank. Every October, I like making a little arrangement of autumn items I call my fall display. I do it partly because I love this time of year’s colors and paraphernalia. I also do it because it’s how I was raised. I thank my mother for this annual impetus to set out gourds, Indian corn, and more, because when I was a kid she decorated our house at different times of the year, appropriate to the season. I’m not talking just the obvious ones like Christmas and Easter, we all decorated on those holidays, but at other times too like St. Patrick’s Day, and Valentines (she loved that one), Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, and don’t forget spring and summer and, well, yes, fall. I don’t think a little autumnally inspired cliche would reflect too badly on this writer (who tries to avoid cliches like the plague): the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Beyond this part of my history whispering to me each year to set up the display, I have adopted this harvest habit as my own for other reasons besides, as I’ve already mentioned, loving fall stuff. I think one reason is my on again, off again, love/hate relationship with time. I am not always happy with how time moves around me. It usually goes too fast or too slow for my liking and comfort, but I live with it. More than that I try to ride time, like a body surfer at the beach. I wade out into the ocean called living and watch the waves approach, then, just at the right moment, I jump in and I try to swim or sometimes just let it carry me to shore. So now, I’m riding the Autumn waves in, moving with time’s rhythms, marking this season with a pile of fall things.
Fall Display, 2011
Another reason I love fall displays is because I love gardens and seeds and fruits-of-the -vine and the vines-of-the-fruit too. I also love juxtaposing, putting thingums and geegaws and what-not where they oughtn’t be or at least where you wouldn’t expect them. What is a fall display but garden things where they oughtn’t be, sitting in the middle of the dining room table instead of in the shed or the root cellar or pantry or even still in the garden itself. No wonder I like to set up a couple miniature bales of straw and a horn of plenty and Indian corn and candy corn and a few apples and a few gourds and maybe some colorful leaves (though they usually don’t last long), and a homegrown butternut squash (yes I play with my food, especially if I grew it), a few small pumpkins (to cook in November), and maybe a braided strand of homegrown garlic and some acorns and fresh fallen walnuts, husk and all, and gosh what I wouldn’t give for a handful of the buckeyes of my youth. I think I’ve colonized over half the table by now! Where will we eat?
I’ve recently discovered one more reason to display fall in our home. After ten months of almost daily essay writing, these ten months of discovering a camera and what you can capture with one, ten months of allowing myself to express what I’m feeling and thinking and seeing and hearing the way I know it needs to be expressed, I’m thinking a fall display is another opportunity to artistically mediate a bit of the world around me, maybe beautifully, I hope truthfully.
So thanks, mom, for the example you set, decorating our house for different seasons and holidays. You gave me a model for doing something that has become another way to express my love and my longing for this world of ours, now beautifully changing around me.
