Autumn on the Upper Gulf Coast
On the Upper Gulf Coast, Fall arrives with the first merciful, melancholy chill of November. Since this is our first cool weekend after a long, hot summer in Houston, I am making chili. The weather finally has dropped out of the 80s and into the 50s. Not exactly a Nor’easter. Not exactly maple harvest time in Vermont. Our fields have none of those old-timey, upright haystacks I drew on poster boards in first grade in Southern Illinois; my Autumn scenes had pumpkins, a red barn, a yellow sun and a dog. I suggested to my wife, Lisa, that we could print photos of Fall foliage in New England and tape them to our windows. She grunted.
Today, makings for chili crowd our countertops. The drone of sports commentators going on about how Alabama is fixin’ to make Mississippi State sorry for being born drifts in from the den. The sky is white as if with snow, and by white I mean medium gray. I’ve got apple cider from Wisconsin in the fridge and a couple of green apples going bad in a bowl. Seems like Autumn to me. Autumn enough.
This morning, I pulled down the old, porcelain serving platter pictured above to drain some bacon. It belonged to Lisa’s grandmother. I’ve always liked its simple, nostalgic look. It reminds me of Thanksgiving because of the color and what the men in the picture are wearing. It’s not valuable except as a family keepsake; Lisa looked it up. In 1935, the Hall China Company made serving pieces with this silhouette of two grandpas arguing in a Tavern. I can envision this plate for sale on a card table in a grocery or drug store and I can see a woman in a printed cotton dress taking it home and showing it off to the lady next door, who might have sneaked over to the store later to pick up one for her daughter.
It looks to me like these men met one evening just before Thanksgiving, in olden times, for a pint or two, it being too wet to attend to their fields and too late and dark to see to their accounts, and besides, their eyes are not very useful by candlelight anymore. They are grumbling about British taxes on sugar and molasses. It’s my First Day of Autumn, so I get to decide what’s going on in the platter scene. It will be Lisa’s First Day of Autumn, too, if she likes my chili.
In Houston, where the sun never quits trying, one makes Thanksgivings and Christmases of the Dickens or Rockwell or Kincade variety by way of the imagination and maybe a decorative serving platter. Calendars decree official seasons – Spring begins March 19, 20 or 21, depending – it has to do with the sun and the equator and makes sense after you Google “What is the spring equinox” and picture farmers of old planting fields with a Bible in one pocket and a copy of Old Farmer’s Almanac in the other. But I think, for most of us, seasons are a matter of the heart and of what to reach for in coat closets. Winter here is often hardly worth mentioning; it doesn’t really show up until January. By late February, you are strolling among azaleas.
I find it comforting, for some reason, that mankind still watches the sky for guidance on Earthly matters, conceding that we dance to music played from so far away we cannot see the stage, so cheap were our tickets. Farmers sit in church pews and pray for good weather. Astronomers peer through telescopes and wonder what else is out there and what it’s doing. It’s been that way since the beginning.
If my chili fails to summon Autumn, I can look for it at the Houston Arboretum, a 155-acre nature sanctuary a few minutes away from where Lisa and I live. There, Fall brings changes to the natural world, many subtle, some bold. It’s a show I don’t like to miss.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.