On the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, when the days begin to shorten and the air to chill, the town of Bayfield holds its annual apple festival. People come from around the world to enjoy all things apple, from picking their own fruit in local orchards to tasting and rating pies to competing to make the longest continuous strip of peel.
As a young girl, I looked forward to my family’s annual pilgrimage to this lakeside haven just a couple hours north of our home. My parents and sisters and I lived tucked into a cozy tree-studded property just outside the Nicolet National Forest. To me the exposed, blue-gray, rock-strewn beaches and white-capped waves of Lake Superior’s freshwater, inland sea felt absolutely wild.
Each year as we shivered in the early autumn chill, eating warm apple donuts dusted with cinnamon sugar and drinking fresh cider, we welcomed in the season together. It was joyful and somber, the festival offering delights while the winds wailed a different promise.
Summer is coming to an end, they told us. Winter is on its way.
If we aren’t careful, autumn can look like only a goodbye. Where there were once lush fields there will soon be snow. Birds will leave us to migrate north. Bears will disappear into hibernation. All that was green and growing and fruitful will turn silent and still.
“Winter is coming,” my mom used to say with dread, her hands cupped around a mug of coffee as she stared out the window, watching leaves turn crimson and yellow and sunset-orange.
I didn’t understand her trepidation then. I hadn’t yet lived through my own winters as a parent, trapped indoors with young children. I hadn’t yet faced my own transition into the autumn of middle age.
Fall is the season of limits. The season of mortality.
“Everyone is but a breath,” the psalmist writes. “Even those who seem secure” (39:5 NIV). Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the fall, as the trees lose their leaves and the landscape turns barren.
I celebrated my 44th birthday at the end of August. I am now decidedly midlife. The turn into middle age surprises many of us, I think. (We knew we’d get old, but we didn’t expect it to start so soon!) Where there was once sowing, there is now the harvest. Where there once was newness of life, there is now maintaining, curating, continuing. There is also a lot of letting go.
I know now I’ll never be an Olympic figure skater, for one thing. (Childhood dreams die hard!) I also know that the course of my life is set by God-given limits. Marriage to one man. Ministry in one place. Mothering to these three children. In order to embrace these good dreams, I’ve had to let go of others.
But this, too, is one of the hidden joys of autumn. We thrive within limits. We need seasons of growth and newness and joy, but we need ones of quiet, too. Seasons of hiddenness. Seasons of rest.
“I live in tranquility and trembling,” Annie Dillard writes in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a reminder to us all that silence and holiness are not opposites but kin. It is not always the boldest, brashest, brightest things that draw us nearest to the Lord. Sometimes God whispers. Often we find God in the fallow places.
A few Novembers ago I traveled to south Texas for the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival. One guide took our group — nine birders all slung with binoculars and wearing pants with too many pockets — to a nondescript forest trail. He walked slowly beside the gray-brown trees. We’d spent the morning at lush mangroves and pristine beaches, but this trail was drab and buggy, and before long we got a little antsy.
“A scout told me the bird is probably here,” the guide said. “But it may be very hard to find.” He pulled up a photo on his phone to show us the common pauraque, a bird the size of an acorn squash that looks about as alluring as a tree stump. Despite its unimpressive looks, I’d been searching for it for almost five years.
“They’re nocturnal,” he told us. “And they sleep on the ground because their camouflage is so good it fools predators.” We searched and searched with no luck until a young birder from another group tiptoed over.
“Are you looking for the pauraque?” he said. His name was Peter. He was 9 years old. We nodded, and he took a few more steps and pointed into the underbrush. “There it is.”
As one we peered into the bush, scratching our heads. There was no bird. There were only leaves and bits of tree bark and the scrubby chaparral of south Texas. But then — wait — was that a wing?
“I see it,” said the guide, triumphant. “Let me put the birding scope on it so you can all spot it more clearly.”
We took turns looking at the sleeping bird. Partially obscured by a tree trunk, its soft wings folded to rest, we could glimpse feathers swirled in blacks and browns and grays perfectly blending into its habitat.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
On that trip we saw rare falcons swoop for prey, bright parrots scream from the roof of a Whataburger, and chachalacas sun themselves on a forest trail. But the pauraque stayed with me. It was no less beautiful than the other birds in its subtlety. It was no less regal in its quietness. It was no less a wonder in its solitude. But we could appreciate it only because we stilled ourselves enough to have eyes to see. (The child in our midst had not yet lost that skill!)
In Luke 10, Jesus turns to his disciples. “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see” (10:23 NIV), he says.
Autumn can be a tricky season. It heralds change, endings and mortality. It reminds us that we must let go in order to live, and that one day we must let go in order to die. Neither of these is easy. But the Lord meets us in the trees and the birds, the pages of Scripture and the icy winds off the northern lakes. The Spirit whispers to us, “Peace, be still.”
