JOY ALONG THE WAY: COTILLION OF AUTUMN'S DEPARTURE

When we come near to the ending of a good book, we keep fingering the waning thickness of the pages left, half wishing there were more. That's the way it is with the dwindling of summer and fall days. Just another month, we beg, another two weeks, two days.

With a book we can go back and re-read some chapters, enjoying once again the words and well turned phrases until, reluctantly, it is placed on the bookshelf. Still, it is available.

With the seasons you can't do that. Maybe nature will offer a few bright sunny days in the midst of several cold cloudy ones, creating the false impression that you have, by wishing, delayed time, but the inevitability of forward movement is there.

To compensate for this inevitability which you wish weren't so inevitable, the closing of the summer/fall season is the most gracious of endings. Things dance and float and swirl around, gypsy-colored, in obedience to some unseen choreographer. Watching them, one feels, almost, that he can levitate clear up to the treetops and join in the aerial festival of the leaves, the various drifting flosses, the fluttering of southward bound butterflies.

Although the body, restrained by Newton's law, must remain anchored to the ground, such is not so of the imaginative spirit. I sit (do a lot of sitting these days on account of temporarily mechanically stiffened knee) and see a red-gold leaf depart from the very top of a sweet gum tree. It hesitates momentarily as if stunned by this new freedom, then is caught in an updraft and swirls higher as if to say, "So, Sir Isaac, you think I have to go down immediately? Watch this."

The multi-colored leaf does a slow Missouri waltz about the high wire, deciding whether or not to land there for a while, then drifts, zigzaggy, upward for a bit and grabs hold of a dark red dogwood leaf that is still firmly attached to its parent twig. The two seem to confer for a few minutes. I think the gum leaf is proposing to the dogwood leaf to "Come along with me. Let us go to the dance." But the dogwood leaf hangs on stubbornly, not yet ready to join the whirling, swirling amalgamation of rustling leaves below.

Butterflies flutter, crookedly, here and there. Any day now I expect to see one of them alight on a wind-blown leaf and hitch a hike for a little while to rest its wings for the long journey ahead. In spirit I journey with it, blowing thistle down out of the way, breaking the mighty silken ropes of floating spider webs. Oh, how strong I am, un-earthbound.

Nothing but nature choreographs the movement of fall and should have an Emmy or Oscar or whatever one gives to a talented, intangible, creative force.

Just when you think everything has come to a standstill in motion, a bird's feather comes drifting down and sticks upright in the grass as one would stick a corsage pin into a pincushion.

Accumulations of leaves roll across the yard gracefully and arrange themselves in pleasing patterns under trees or in house corners, then, like a changing kaleidoscope, they blow in an opposite direction and arrange themselves elsewhere--a Persian rug dealer showing off his wares.

Every once in a while an acorn, not in sync with the effortless grace of the autumn dance, falls to the ground as if to add a sensible period at the end of some special flurry of movement. A squirrel looks down to where it has fallen as if to inscribe the spot on his mind. He frisks his bushtail to break the pause in the silent orchestration of the graceful season.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.