The Emporia Gazette

November 22, 2008

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“That’s why we moved back here,” my friend Tracy said, when I mentioned the four seasons.

“In Houston, it went from warm and wet, to hot and wet, and back to warm and wet,” she said. “Here the seasons change; it’s not the same thing every day.”

Yes, Kansas is smack-dab in the middle of four-seasons country. Go a ways north (think Minnesota, where it gets seriously cold), and winter will consume a larger portion of your life.

Kansas has a fairly even balance, three months per season, give or take, just like the calendar intended.

The earth has tilted again. This time we’ve landed in autumn.

Tomato vines are shriveling. They still have the tomato-plant smell, but the edges of leaves are burnt, yellow and curling. And the lone green tomato on the vine doesn’t have the strength to turn red.

This season of shadows is as deep and mysterious as a Gregorian chant. In the evenings we feel autumn’s ghosts, as a whisper of air slips down the back of our shirts.

Cool mornings bring giddiness to Kansans and you can overhear that joy in conversations at the post office. Voices are bright and footsteps quicken because the fever of summer has been broken.

No one missed out on the changeover to autumn. We knew it immediately, that first morning when we stepped out onto our porches. The sky felt like a friend again and we knew the sun had laid down its weapons.

Humidity has been exiled to some foreign land down-under and the sky above us is as blue as see-through-blue can be.

It’s always that blue that brings us home. It’s the blue sky that apologizes for the harshness of the sun, asks us kindly to forgive, to stay in Kansas, even though it knows, really, that we could never live anywhere else.

I’ve been here my entire life, so this cycle of temperature change every three months is my only experience. Although I’ve argued against the inclusion of winter in the seasonal lineup, it does give a certain balance to the year.

“Having four seasons encourages you to vary your activities,” Tracy said. “You do things in winter you wouldn’t otherwise do.” She’s right. And we may not be able to change the seasons, but the seasons have changed us. We are who we are because of where we live. Thunderstorms and tornadoes have made us brave and hard winters have made us strong.

Many of our memories are filed away by season. This is how we mark time.

The feel of the air, the shift of the wind can bring back a moment from the past. On a gusty morning recently, my mind slipped back to last October, the day I stood in a cemetery as a northwest gale whipped at a funeral tent.

Many of us have spent year after year learning the Kansas autumn. We know the leaf dust that crawls into the creases of skin when we rake our lawns. And when we smell burning leaves, our thoughts drift back to childhood.

During these changeover months, there’s always a tug-of-war in the atmosphere. Summer and fall battle it out — but summer always surrenders.

And we know even now that winter is lurking, planning a stealth-like takeover of autumn.

Soon, we’ll slide into the early sunsets of October, kick through November’s grounded leaves, and then we’ll step out into the airless nights of December.

Cold will thicken the sky and commandeer the land, freezing lake and river, sod and soil. February will come with an ice pick and brighter, longer days. March brings purple thunderstorms; April returns the green.

But for now, we live our days and nights in autumn.

“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.

F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.

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