Embracing autumn, and the changes it brings.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." - novelist George Eliot

It doesn't make any sense, really, this love of autumn.

Why welcome shorter days, cooler nights and the end of summer's garden bounty?

But some of us do.

Autumn may have taken us out for some rough spins - snowed on our end-of-season backpacking trips, frosted our pumpkins. Still, we lean into this ephemeral window between summer and winter, checking forecasts, feeling self-satisfied when school starts up again, because we know that fair-weather vacationers have finally abandoned our favorite outdoor spots.

Other seasons have their devotees - spring with its promise of renewal, summer heat that insists we kick back, winter with its high-profile holidays and extreme sports.

But autumn promises nothing, only warns of change.

It doesn't even keep to the planetary schedule, which puts the official start of the season on Sept. 22, the day the sun is directly over the equator. Fall arrives whenever it wants, sometime between late August and early October.

And it doesn't linger, not like spring. By the end of October, even though winter is technically not due until Dec. 21, the weather has shifted. The chance of rain has jumped from 30 percent on any given day to 60 percent - and those odds persist right through February, weather averages reveal.

But it all starts with the first cool nights that prompt us to break out the flannel sheets and the extra blanket. Then we start looking around for autumn's color show.

At some point in September, deciduous trees stop producing chlorophyll, the stuff that makes their leaves green and that helps convert sunlight into energy.

Without the chlorophyll, the other colors present in leaves suddenly become visible - the brilliant reds of maples, the snappy yellow of elms.

Trees have done the complicated math and figured out that during winter, they can't absorb enough water through their roots to make up for the loss through their much buffeted leaves, so they don't even bother.

Once the chlorophyll is gone, trees plug the connection between twig and leaf, and the first good breeze easily snatches the leaves away.

The jet stream packs whole seasons into a single day, piling up clouds that fling rain briefly down on us before snuffing the rainmakers eastward, leaving afternoon sun to steam sodden bark dust and sidewalks dry again.

Sometimes autumn weather pulls out all the stops. That's what happened on Columbus Day, 1962, when a storm walloped the West Coast from California to British Columbia with hurricane-force winds.

At Mount Hebo west of Salem, the anemometer measuring wind speed clocked a gust at 131 mph before winds destroyed the gauge, state climatologist George Taylor says.

That storm, actually a cluster of storms, pulled down trees and tore off roofs, killed 28 people, all but destroyed 5,000 homes and damaged between 40,000 and 50,000 more.

Something in the changing weather shifts something in our psyches, too. The frothy reads of summer, the films with all the staying power of cotton candy, no longer seem so compelling.

This year's "Shrek" and "Spiderman" movie sequels will make way for fall offerings that include biographies - one about Alexander the Great by director Oliver Stone and another about Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.

Even fall gardens follow this trend. We may have lost the sumptuous berries of summer, but the apples and pears coming on now will stay fresh well into winter, as will potatoes, carrots, onions and garlic. They'll carry us through until the first shoots of spring lettuce wake up the garden next year.

Birders in fall have double the pleasure. While plenty of birds winter here, thousands more fly over on migration routes that span entire continents.

A feeder in the backyard will attract little twitterers - chickadees, juncos, nutcrackers. And a trip to the coast, anywhere from the Bandon Marsh Wildlife Refuge to Cape Arago near Coos Bay, will offer sightings of grebes, oystercatchers, plovers and other shorebirds making their way south for the winter.

Gentler climes will tempt plenty of us out of Oregon come dreary January.

But for now it's fall, and those of us who love the season have already aired out our sweaters and put our tank tops away.

CAPTION(S):

The changing of colors in the leaves of deciduous trees is just one reason to savor the season.