Thinking of Fall
OCTOBER 6, 2007 Listen to this Story
- Fall Memories
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Debbie Samuels of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., grew up in Connecticut, where the leaves changing were a beloved event each year. Now that she's in Florida, the dramatic colors of New England are harder to come by. Unless of course someone sends them to you. We'll hear how Samuels gets the season sent to her in the mail.
Letter from Debbie Samuels
It's autumn in New Haven—"the Elm City"—in the late 1950s. Our backyard and greater neighborhood was a whirl of trees: apple, pear, chestnut, maple, white birch, and the then ubiquitous elm. For pennies us kids would race around and rake up the ever-falling leaves. And then we'd claim a large pile and roll in the whole palette until the leaves worked their way under sweaters and jackets and up noses and ears. In this pre-global warming environment, after throwing yourself 'til exhaustion in the crackly, colorful mounds, the next step was to burn them. You really arrived when the adults trusted you to light the pile, stoke it, and supervise its transformation from red-yellow-orange to charred crumbled browns.
When I moved to the Caribbean in 1976, while intoxicated by the lush tropical landscape, the lack of seasonal changes was depressing. Enter my mom with a simple solution. She gathered up an enormous bunch of leaves from our yard and mailed the lot to me. Every year I'd dump the slightly soggy but gloriously autumny-smelling haul on my terrazzo floor and proceed to roll and romp away. I did, however, eliminate the lighting of the pile much to my landlord's relief. The tradition continued when work took me to Miami, a city replete with palm trees that never quite dazzle when their fronds yellow and die.
When mom passed away in 1996, the leaf-mailing fell to my Aunt Gus. That first, emotional year, and right up to the present, instead of stuffing a large envelope with leaves, Gus personally selects a perfect leaf sampling and presses them between waxed paper! No amount of cajoling or pleading can shake her from this sanitized variation on a ritual. I've learned to carefully pull away the waxed paper shrouds, arrange the leaves in a tiny heap, do an aging leaf dance, and then inhale the veiled aromas of autumns past.
Debbie Samuels
New Smyrna Beach, Fla.
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- Music Bridge:
- Whims of Chambers
- Artist: Paul Chambers
- CD: Whims of Chambers (Blue Note)
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