According to the Gregorian Calendar, autumn begins on the 21st of September, just before the Fall Equinox. According to the National Weather Service, autumn begins on the 1st of September, perhaps the only forecast they can make with complete certitude about Oberlin’s weather. And, according to the Oberlin Academic Calendar, the fall semester this year began on the 27th of August.
The beginning of a season, I believe, is not something you can put on a calendar, not like a holiday or an exam. I know what autumn in Oberlin is—how it looks from a window, what it feels like when you step outside, the way it smells in the air.
Autumn in Oberlin begins with the wind.
There are late summer breezes, of course, the kind that take the edge off the heat and make the shade comfortably cool for a time, gently rustling the leaves and throwing dappled shadows onto students studying in the grass of North Quad. These are fleeting, however—just passing through, not here to stay. When the true Autumn gusts arrive, they send clouds scudding across the sky, tousling hair and setting the banners on Oberlin’s lampposts flapping. Sometimes, it brings rain with it, but not always. The first brave leaves to fall ride on it like birds soaring on thermals, before drifting to the ground to crunch underfoot, harbingers of the new season.
Indeed the leaves are next to change, although you would be forgiven for missing it, at first. For some reason it is the trees around Peters Hall that change first, the antiquarian aura of its elegant stonework prematurely aging the flora around it. From Peters, the swath of yellows and oranges spreads into Tappan Square like slow-motion wildfire, until all the trees in Oberlin are aflame.
The people of Oberlin are slow to change, but they get the message eventually. All it takes is one brisk walk back from class in a t-shirt, chased back home by the threat of rain, to impress on me that at last the days of 80-degree evenings are over. Some holdouts continue to traverse the quads in shorts, but for my part I am overjoyed to pull the wool coats and scarves from my closet, where they have been waiting patiently for their time. One day, as I step out onto the porch, a sudden gust of wind sweeps over me, and I find myself spreading my arms wide, coat and scarf flapping like banners in the breeze.
“What are you doing?” my housemate Ellie asks me, bemused. We are, after all, supposed to be going to class. “Are you summoning Autumn?”
If only I could. But I cannot make Autumn come before its time, nor bid it overstay its welcome here. I cannot ask it to wait while I get another apple cider from Slow Train, or bake another batch of pumpkin scones, or take one last walk in the arboretum while the leaves are still turning. I cannot even ask the leaves to paint the trees in every shade of orange and gold, unless I accept that they will eventually fall and be carried away from Oberlin on that same wind that once welcomed them.
“No,” I say, answering Ellie’s question. “I’m greeting it.” Like so many other friends, Autumn has returned to spend one last year with me here in Oberlin. I don’t know how long it will stay, but I plan to cherish every moment of it.
