Autumn, or Something Like It

Living in Beirut you don’t ever get the sense that autumn has arrived. At least not in the way most East Coast Americans are accustomed to welcoming the new season. Unless you go out into the mountains, you really don’t see the changing color of the leaves. There’s no real transition from green to yellow…from orange and red to brown. In Beirut, the air cools and the sun casts a different hue of brightness on everything. It’s the only real sense I have of the changing season. What’s missing is that single event or series of events that triggers a voice in my head to whisper “summer is coming to an end”. Living here, there’s no college homecoming football games, no tailgating parties and definitely no trick ‘or treat-ers knocking on my door looking for sugary goodies. There aren’t any parks where Marlowe and I can go running through the leaves. On most sunny afternoons on the weekend, I can still throw on a pair of shorts and crocs (don’t judge) and go walking through the neighborhood.

What I’m left with is a feeling of some sort of dissonance with my surroundings. It’s November, yet the air is not crisp…and it’s certainly not fresh. I need four seasons. I need the experience of wanting the summer to last a few weeks longer at the end of August. I want the anticipation of the season’s first dewy frost on my plants. Beirut makes a decent yet insincere effort to create this shift. Mannequins in store windows are dressed with sweaters. There’s even a ‘seasonal’ store a few blocks away from my home that sells wooden baskets filled with pine cones  and reindeers  – the kitschy ones with lights. But it’s all so artificial.

I just got back from a short holiday in Budapest. The air was cool and crisp. I could walk through parks and kick the yellow and orange maple leaves around with my boots and hear the crunch of first fallen leaves beneath my heel. I could see the frothy layer of fog slowly lift up from the Danube like a warm exhale in cold air. I could wrap my pashmina scarf around my neck to calm the shivers. I could warm my hands around a paper cup of piping hot mulled wine. And I had the longing of wanting to walk Marlowe all over town…right along with all the other dogs who seemed to have carte blanche entry into nearly every restaurant and shop. In the evening, as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, melancholy would come and linger just long enough to say hello. Fall is there….not here.

My Thanksgiving feast is just a couple of weeks away and the show must go on, with or without yellow and brown maple leaves. With or without cool crisp air. I have a dear friend who is a fragrance designer. When I moved to Beirut a couple of years ago, she sent me one of her creations. It was a bottle of ‘Leaves’. With one press of the pump, my home was instantly filled with the scent of fallen pine cones, cinnamon and crunchy…well…leaves. And, like my melancholy its’ scent lingered just long enough.  It is Autumn in a bottle…or something like it.

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