The Autumn Leaves Of Youth

By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net

When it’s spring and the rocky shoals spider lilies bloom, spring’s my favorite season. When mornings of chilled air and radiant leaves arrive, fall’s my favorite season. When I think of autumn memories, first on my list are my days standing by the Augusta Highway waiting on the school bus.

When you wait on a bus, you’re a captive. Your senses stave off boredom. I best remember October’s cold mornings of frost-glazed grasses, whiffs of woodsmoke, and a phenomenon called rabbit frost, tiny pillars of earth that spew from the ground capped by frost.

Why do those early mornings waiting on a bus seem special?

Easy answer. Morning light. We were up with the sun. That early gold light drenched leaves with color, sparkled the rabbit frost, and the cold air made me feel alive and grateful for autumnal majesty. Though we had a lot of pines along our stretch of the Augusta Highway, oaks and hickories flamed among the green.

When you are a Southern kid a cold morning seems colder than it is. I could see my breath on those early fall mornings. My silver vapors vanished in a sliver of a second. My hands froze. If I had gloves I don’t recall wearing them. I read that folks long ago would bake potatoes and put them in pockets for warmth. Clever, an emergency food or snack. Today we use those chemically activated pocket warmers. Tear them open so oxygen can go to work and the heat is on. Progress ….

The occasional out-of-timing truck would rumble by spewing fumes that for some strange reason made me think of my grandfather’s smokehouse. A strange memory comes to me as I write. An elderly gent, Mr. Fletcher Reed, would drive by with his left arm sticking out stiff as a board. He’d bang his arm on the door. He always did that. Was he keeping time to music?

Until the bus arrived like clockwork I had time to take in fall, an unintended blessing. As soon as I stepped into the bus, autumn’s leaves gave way to noise and soon we were at school, thoughts of leaves and ice gone for the day.

Second on my list of the autumn leaves of youth are walks through home’s aromatic woods. When you’re among hardwoods, fallen leaves put off scents … peppery, leather-like fragrances, spice-like fragrances.

It’s noisy walking through fall. The crunch of fallen leaves makes a ruckus. I can’t imagine the Cherokee walking through fallen leaves as quiet as a whisper. That was folklore. Dry oak and maple leaves crunch beneath feet—all feet. Physics doesn’t grant exemptions, but it does paint our lives with color. While the fall foliage change is mostly biology and chemistry, the colors themselves come from physics: sunlight strikes pigments that absorb some visible wavelengths of light and reflect others. Biology decides when the pigments change. The physics of light paint the hillsides and forests.

Much has changed since my October days of waiting on that gear-clashing bus. I never saw rabbit frost again. As for those woods, they’ve been mine since 1982. I’ve yet to cut one tree. Even so, many of my oaks and hickories are literally gone with the wind. Hurricane Helene blew over the trees of youth.

The stretch of Augusta Highway in front of my old home expanded into a passing lane and the shoulder I waited on lies beneath asphalt. Like a maple leaf flashing red Old No. 20, the red-and-white school bus like no other that took me to school and football games. I never saw another bus like it but I won’t forget it, just as I will never forget my days of marveling at rabbit frost and fall leaves in that cold Georgia air.