Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 308, 20 March 1928, Page 3

Mundane Musings

Autumn Reflections

To each season its prospects and re- j trospects, its hopes and memories, its ' vegetables, its gas bill and its hats.

Autumn is the reflective season of the year. It is the season connected with a gentle, pervasive melancholy. Summer is over, winter is ahead; we are at the half-way house between the two. It is a time of falling away of declension; the full arc of life has entered upon its descent. The sun has crossed the equator and is travelling southward again. The late haymaking is over; the last cricket match has been played; the extra postman, put on to cope with the influx of visitors, has been taken off the round. Things come and go: things decay and die; everything changes, nothing is what it was or what it is going to be. So we reflect, sadly, as we return the bad egg. stiffly, to the grocer’s boy at the back-door.

The autumnal mood is a favourite one with poets, who incline as a race to melancholy, probably because there are more sad words that rhyme than cheerful ones, and also because melanchody is better for the figure. The convenient and euphonious connection between “wane” and “pain,” •'leaves” and “grieves,” “sigh” and “die,” will be obvious to everybody. But it is not only poets who become reflective in autumn. Practical, busy people, too. like ourselves, find the tendency to take a backward glance, as we pause at the half-way house before resuming the march into the stridency of winter. irresistible.

Walking home from the post office, the presence of the sweet, melancholy season is borne in on us in a hundred ways. Several leaves have already fallen; though it is only fair to add that several others haven’t. The hedges are a greenish-grey, where before they were a gi'eyish-green. Hips and haws abound. The shadows under the hedges merge faintly'into the mild grey of the road, and are no longer splashed upon its surface in waves of pure ultra-marine. The lively sum-mer-blue of the sky is thinned rnd draggled, and the colour has run. The green hills and the fields, with their golden plenty, have gone with the blue sky, and have left pale ghosts of themselves to stand sentinel, till they return. The vicar’s lawn has yielded up its emerald (and that reminds ns. we must simply return the rector's umbrella). The cows in the fields that we pas 3 on our way into town in the bus look reflective, too; cows always do, whatever the season.

Up at the golf club faces are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought as their owners realise that soon their subscriptions will be due. In the garden there are dahlias and cannas, Michaelmas daisies and sunflowers, marrows and spiders. Some late roses still flourish, mainly in the neighbour’s. The rambler no longer rambles. But even in autumn, all is not inertia and decline. There is activity as well, and a looking forward. There are those bulbs to be put down for the spring. There are the autumn lists ‘from the publishers. And. whatever we do, we mustn’t forget to slice off the turned-up back of our last year’s felt (“backs” turned up being quite de trop this season), slit it up the side, cut it in the front and otherwise endeavour to make a bargainday ten-and-sixpenny look like a three-guinea creation. . . . Autumn is here!