JOY ALONG THE WAY: FAVORITE CALENDAR SIGNALS START OF AUTUMN'S TAPESTRY

No flags lined the streets Thursday. No businesses closed. No parades. It was just the First Day of Autumn. Hardly anyone took overt notice. But I did. I knew it was coming. My favorite calendar told me so. In addition, I was jolted into awareness one previous morning by the temperature when I took to the porch with my morning coffee. "Whoa," I said, aloud, disturbing the crickets that were still in the clematis vines, fiddling away. "I've got to get a sweater." A sweater! Why, just a few days ago the air conditioner was on.

Seems as if the change of seasons comes more abruptly in the autumn. One hardly notices the first day of summer, weatherwise. It's already hot when it comes. First day of spring is a teaser. The weather is fretful about that change. I like to go down the front walkway now. The hovering pin oak drops its many acorns and as I walk, they crunch beneath my feet, releasing that good nutty smell of autumn. Sometimes I twist my feet to help the release.

Now that the fair is over I must go to the park to see if any good plump persimmons are left on the trees to fall to the ground, a gift to me. Crushed acorns and persimmons! All I need now is some walnuts to hull so I can add that to the fragrance. No, I need some mums. So, off to the mum stores I go. Yellow ones are my favorite, but I can't resist the deep rust colored ones nor the lavender and pink. They adorn my steps.

Inside, apples in a wooden bowl is better than any spray room freshener. The red delicious variety especially give away their essence. In addition, Ellie gave me a fake apple pie in a foil pan which you set on the warm top of the stove. When the oven is on you get the smell of apple pie, even if meat loaf is inside. It prompts me to get busy making real apple pie, with Jonathans, of course, and have a slice of it while it is still warm. This was a good part of my First Day of Autumn celebration.

On that Autumn Begins Day I was even moved to hunt up the little book containing Beatrix Potter's story, "Squirrel Nutkin." C.S. Lewis said that nothing gave him a sense of autumn as that story did. I have that same sense, multiplied by my horde of live squirrel nutkins that are almost frantic now in their burial of acorns, especially the bigger ones from the saw-toothed oak. When I see them digging little holes by the old stump, near the garage corner, by the latticed garden seat, I'm reminded of the Post-it commercial on TV where a hollow tree has been filled with Post-it notes reminders.

My squirrels never find all their buried nuts and every spring I have to pull little oak, walnut and pecan sprouts.

The days are not so full of sound now, what with the children in school and the diminishing of birdsong. However, if you listen, you'll hear the sound of different birds as they pass through on their southward journey. On the First Day of Autumn I heard the "Teacher bird," so called because it calls, "Teacher, teacher, teacher," over and over. Seems so fitting now that the teachers are back at their tasks again. There has been a teacher in my family for four generations that I know of. Who knows, they may go all the way back to the Mayflower! Is there a teacher gene? There was a Jean gene and now there is a Stephen gene. Maybe by the 3000 millennium some generation of the family will be successful in teaching the children to lay down their guns and take up the plowshares of peace and tranquility of a perfect First Day of Autumn and to order that flags be flown and bugles sounded.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.