I’m home and the leaves changed and mostly fell while I was away the past week. I love traveling in the autumn, especially in the north, this time western Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and the mountains of Virginia. Such colors I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, like a painter’s palette, like a quilt. Like fall.

“I lived in a yellow house, like butter,” Van Gogh wrote of his place in Arles where he did his boldest work, filled with colors and tube paints pushed onto the canvas like toothpaste. When we speak today of his work, it is from Arles we mostly mean.

I, too, lived in a yellow house, like butter, along a country road running past a reservoir in central Massachusetts. Next door was a tall, white church with a cemetery, and the road wound up through the small village, past the Deacon’s Bench Antique Store, past the nursing home, up into Sterling and past the cider mill. It ran up the mountain, winding into the village of Princeton on Mt. Wachusett, where in autumn I’d hike to the summit and look across the New England tapestry of orange and rust, stretching clear to Boston, to New Hampshire, and west toward the Quabbin Reservoir. The crisp air, like yesterday in West Virginia, cleared my head, pushing away fears and anxiety. “It’ll be fine,” it whispered. Well, it won’t, I thought, but for now it is, and sometimes that’s enough.

I wonder if I’m starting to enjoy autumn more now than summer because I’m getting older.

The trail behind the house is covered beautifully in leaves that no step, yet, has trodden black, though signs of deer are evident. They bed down in a holly grove at the far end of the property and walk down toward the patio where the deep, heavy birdbath is apparently now theirs. The front path remains mostly clear as it runs in such a way and is wide enough for a soft northern breeze to keep the leaves to the side. But not always, and certainly not after a good, steady October rain like last week before I left. There’s something so immediate about autumn.

It is the time of year my father died. I read somewhere that other than the holidays, autumn is the most common time of year for elderly deaths. Younger people die more in Summer, which makes sense for the numbers out doing things they probably shouldn’t be, and January through March has the highest rates of suicide.

It’s odd how so many people come to life in autumn when nature is slipping away for a while, ducking behind the guise of death, returning half a year later, slowly. For now, it is beautiful, and the colors reflect in the duck pond and out on the river. They shine back at the hills I walked around a few days ago, and they remind me that for now, just for now, we’re all noticing the same beauty. It’s incredible that people throughout the autumn world all marvel and gaze at the ripple of color coming down the tree line, the scatterings of hues under oaks and maples and birches, and how the white trunks stand forth as the control group so we can see just how fine a job nature did.

I used to get depressed in autumn, feeling the summer slip away, the time of life and the sun on my back. It always, absolutely always, brought me to life, so I pushed the fall off as much as I could, perhaps anticipating what happens after the fall, in the dead of winter when hope is often difficult to unearth. But now I find in autumn something reassuring. Maybe it is simply that even growing old and letting go can be done with absolute beauty and grace.

At the end of The Lion in Winter, Geoffrey wonders what difference it makes how a man falls, and Richard remarks, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

Nature knows how to make an exit. She knows how to hold her own. I suppose her last green is gold as well as her first. I am surprised I have been so resistant to change. Maybe I’m getting tired.

Or maybe I just miss my yellow house near the Old Stone Church on the road to Wachusett.