For many of us, fall brings leaves to rake and sometimes to burn. It brings memories of visiting cider mills and eating sweet doughnuts as we sipped fresh apple cider. This week, take a moment to describe fall days either from the past or from right now. Begin by listing images of the season in phrases from the past and/or present: Who is or was this season peopled with in your life? What activities repeat occur for you this time of year? What goes on in the landscape? What birds and animals are coming or going? Do the markets have different fruits and vegetables, window dressings, and products than in summer? Do the people around you wear different clothes and carry different things, including their expressions, than at other seasons? What activities did you do with your parents or grandparents in fall? What holidays did you celebrate and how? By writing phrases with specific images in them you are focusing in and will be able to quickly create writing around selected moments and observations.

To do this, set your list of image-phrases aside for a moment and read these short excerpts from Thoreau’s journals. In the first, written October 7, 1857, Thoreau is lamenting having visitors — he doesn’t know how to entertain people who don’t like to go on long walks:

If they can’t walk, why won’t they take an honest nap and let me go in the afternoon? But, come two o’clock, they alarm me by an evident disposition to sit. In the midst of the most glorious Indian-summer afternoon, there they sit, breaking your chairs and wearing out the house, with their backs to the light, taking no note of the lapse of time….

Six years earlier, on October 7, he had written:

By the side of J.P. Brown’s grain-field I picked up some white oak acorns in the path by the wood-side, which I found to be unexpectedly sweet and palatable, the bitterness being scarcely perceptible…Such as these are no mean food … Their sweetness is like the sweetness of bread, and to have discovered this palatableness in this neglected nut, the whole world is to me sweeter for it…I should be at least equally pleased if I were to find that the grass tasted sweet and nutritious. It increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes.

 What I admire in these passages is the focus and the wit. From Thoreau’s annoyance with his sluggish visitors for holding him back comes a memorable phrase of projection: “wearing out the house.” Even without description, I can see whoever they are, stuck in their host’s chairs, making him incredibly agitated and jumpy as he wishes to leave for a walk in the warm, sunny Indian summer afternoon. In the second excerpt, I admire the tight writing that allows me to be with Thoreau as he puts the white acorns in his mouth and describes the taste, its effect on him, and what he would wish for–that grass would be as good for him. Thinking this way, “increases the number of my friends; it diminishes the number of my foes” Thoreau reports and I am with him, closer to the world, joyous to be a part of it.

Where can you place yourself in your day, past or present, and make a thrilling discovery from the season? Where can you place yourself in your day that leads to happiness in a solitude away from those who do not share the excitement of the season?

You can begin a journal entry with these words:

“It is _______ (early, middle, late) _______ (month of the year) and I am __________(put an activity in here like walking, sitting, spying, sailing, chopping wood, cleaning gutters, calling the dogs in). It is ___________(insert an adjective that describes a feeling, i.e. lonely, crowded, pleasing, chilly, scary, comfortable). I am going to tell you why it is this way….”

From here on out roam around in the scene you are writing, identifying specific memories from this season. Use imagery that appeals to the five senses as well as commentary like Thoreau does. Hopefully you will make a discovery, sweet as Thoreau’s acorn, about something or some person in your day being crucial to who you are.

Six Extensions for This Exercise

1. Think of those people in Thoreau’s entry breaking the chairs and wearing out the house with their sitting. Who in your life seems to slow you down or be unaware of all the excitement and beauty you find in the world around and inside you? Let them speak from that chair facing the wall where they can ignore the light. What are their thoughts?
2. Write in supplication to one of the people in your life who sits in those chairs, back to the light. Write them out of their chairs to visit the season with you.
3. Write about a day as if your writing were going into a time capsule to be unearthed in an epoch when the earth has changed geologically and the land and neighborhood where you are now will be gone. Preserve it in this season in your writing.
4. Write to a storekeeper or a crossing guard or bird on a wire or a tree about to lose its leaves telling the person or thing how their presence and actions have mattered to you.
5. Imagine planning a party to celebrate the season. Write a description of the party–who is invited? What do the invitations look like? Where is the party held? What does the setting look like? What is served to the guests? What activities are planned for the party? What music? What do the pictures you took during the party look like? Perhaps your writing starts with a description of those imaginary pictures. Or perhaps you have held a memorable party in fall; in that case, find a picture and write about the party.
6. How would Fall eulogize Summer or Summer eulogize Spring or Spring eulogize Winter or Winter eulogize Fall? Imagine the season you are in as the offspring of the season that came before it. Have it, as the only child, give a speech at its parent’s memorial service. What does your season say on behalf of her mother or father? How does she praise and show affection and talk about what she has inherited?