Remember how you felt as seasons changed when you were a child ? The first flakes of winter , the first buds of spring , the first hot days of summer , or the first turned leaves of autumn felt like enchantment .
Considered narrowly , seasons are merely natural phenomena — changes in light , temperature , and weather patterns that repeat yearly as the Earth ’ s tilt points us toward or away from our sun . However , children do not consider the changing seasons narrowly . When the seasons change , children are thrilled .
Not that adults are immune to intense feelings about the seasons . Like children , we too await the return of each season with a tingle of impatience , because each season has features we love . Many artists , writers , and musicians celebrate the seasons . Take the early nineteenth-century English poet John Keats as an example . In his ode “ To Autumn ,” Keats presented a poet speaking to Autumn as if to a being who deserved praise for filling “ all fruit with ripeness to the core ,” for swelling gourds , for plumping hazel shells “ with a sweet kernel ,” and for setting late flowers budding “ for the bees , / Until they think warm days will never cease .” The poet imagines Autumn “ sitting careless on a granary floor ,” surrounded by the bounties of harvest . Later he sees her fallen asleep in the sunny warmth of a half-harvested field , “ drowsed with the fume of poppies .” Wherever he looks , the poet sees dreamy , ripe overabundance .
Keats saw one kind of beauty in an early nineteenth-century fall countryside on land that had been cultivated for centuries . The early twentieth-century painter Tom Thomson taught Canadians how to see a different kind of beauty in the Canadian wilderness . The vision of fall in Thomson ’ s 1916 sketch , “ Autumn , Algonquin Park ,” is a century of time and an ocean of distance away from the vision of fall that we experienced in Keats ’ s ode . The sketch places us not in Keats ’ s cultivated countryside but at the edge of a river in the bush . We see a rocky foreground punctuated by several struggling saplings , and , at mid-range , a band of dark blue river interrupted by scarlet splashes representing shrubs at the shoreline . Beyond the river lies a browning meadow and a range of dark blue hills . Dramatic brush strokes suggest dynamic movement in the lighter blue sky , echoing the movement of the rushing water . Compared to Keats ’ s vision of fall bounty , the beauty Thomson sees is spare , even austere , and almost forbidding .
Although Thomson taught us to see rugged beauty in the Canadian wilderness , his scarlets , dark oranges and browns , and dusky greens do not suit the colours of an Alberta fall . Instead , the best place to find our colours is in landscapes by Alberta artists , such as “ Leafy Path ,” by Jim Visser . In that painting , a leaf-strewn path winds gently from the centre foreground to the midpoint of the painting where it meets the horizon and disappears into an untroubled blue sky . As it winds , the path passes through a stand of brilliant , yellow-leaved aspens . Green shrubbery lines it on both sides , further defining the path ’ s shape and accentuating the yellow shimmer of the aspens ’ leaves . Nature is radiant in Visser ’ s vision of fall , and not only radiant , but also , considering the path , invitational . The painting offers a kind of enchantment with nature , but one located in ordinary time and space .
Our perceptions of the world around us combine what exists with how we choose to see it . When children see the seasons change , they are enchanted . Whether we are also enchanted may depend on how we choose to see .
Lloyd Den Boer is a retired educator living in Edmonton with his wife Audrey . For them , fall enchantment means time spent on a back deck , watching their larch turn golden .
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