Autumn's Soft Call

The Gentle Weight of Autumn Wistfulness

There's a beautiful, soft sadness that settles in with the turn of the leaves—a feeling that I have called melancholy. It's not like grief, but a flicker of deep emotion, like tracing the outline of a beautiful memory.

For me, the start is always so subtle it's almost a trick of the mind. It happens sometime in late July, when the sun is still scorching and summer feels eternal. You catch a slight rustling in the breeze—a whisper against the heavy heat—that seems to hint, just for a moment, that the slow, inevitable slide toward fall has begun. Then I forget about it, lost in the relentless heat of August.

Then, it becomes undeniable. The mornings are a little darker, the evenings draw in just a touch sooner. The change is confirmed by the later rise and set of the sun, and suddenly, the feeling is back, no longer a whisper but a warm, enveloping misty cloud of memory mixed with that which never was.

A Collage of Time

This feeling, this wistfulness, immediately launches a journey through time. It's an internal scrapbook of seasons past, where every shift in the air and every fading flower petal acts as a bookmark.

You know the feeling: the rush of memories, unbidden and vivid. You're suddenly back at country school after Labor Day, the crisp air mixing with the scent of damp earth. You can almost feel the worn metal of the old hand pump in the yard, wishing for just a moment that it still worked. And the smell! The rich, vinegary scent of a fresh gallon-sized paste jar, a treasure meant to last the entire school year. It's a happiness tinged with the knowledge that the child who smelled it is long gone.

The wistfulness deepens as the season matures. It carries the echo of deeper, more complex years. You might find yourself back on a high school date, walking under a sky that seemed to promise everything, planning a future that would never quite come to pass in the way you so earnestly imagined it.

And then there's the electric energy of college autumns—the air so crisp it feels ready to shatter, filled with the distant, powerful thrum of the marching band practicing in the stadium. It's the sound of possibility, of new friends, and a life just starting to unfold.

The Beauty in the "Never Was"

What makes this feeling so uniquely bittersweet is that it isn't just about missing what was; it’s also about quietly grieving what never came to be. The life you imagined, the simple world of the past—they are beautiful ghosts that walk with you through the changing light.

And yet, this melancholy isn't unpleasant. It's a reminder of how deeply we can love a place, a time, or a person. It is a quiet moment of gratitude for having lived through all those chapters. The leaves aren't just dying; they are completing their cycle in a magnificent burst of color. And perhaps that's what autumn wistfulness truly is: a quiet, beautiful acknowledgment of our own cycles, and a gentle sigh for the time that has passed, but is never truly lost.

Do you find that certain smells or sounds—like the smell of woodsmoke or the sound of a football game—intensify this feeling for you, too?