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ANOTHER VIEW: JUDAS SEASON by B. A. Brittingham
Another View: Judas Season by B.A. Brittingham
In Florida, autumn’s arrival is marked by the burning of the cane fields. As dark clouds of pungent smoke rise from the inland sugar-producing areas — places bearing names like Pahokee and Belle Glade and Okeechobee — they are tugged toward the densely populated coastal communities by winds that will dissipate them over the ocean. Bits of pale ash settle upon patio furniture and the hoods of cars, and I wonder as I gaze across this land of perennial verdancy, if there are other displaced Yankees like me who pretend that what they are really smelling is the smoke from next door where the neighbor’s reluctant teenager is burning a pile of beech, poplar, and maple leaves.
There exists a shared quirk between the harvests of the north and those of the distant south, a kind of oxymoron which dictates that, in order to have, we must destroy. We pluck the corn and cut the stalks, dig the potatoes and turn under the plants, burn off the underbrush and crop the cane. It is a curious, phoenix-like juxtapositioning of productivity and ruination.
In spite of this, I have always loved the fall. It was one of the many things I hated leaving behind many years ago when my husband’s company transferred him from New York. There is I suppose, something to be said for being able to glance out the window on Thanksgiving Day and view the profusion of color thrown up by a hedge of endlessly blooming hibiscus bushes. But I also recall aster, bayberry, and the scarlet hues of dwarf sumac, their colors made more precious by the very fact of their transience. I miss the sounds as well: the relentless scratch of a leaf rake against a cracked concrete sidewalk, the puffing of my father as he forces a difficult storm window into place, the tenacity of long dead oak leaves in the face a persistent wind…memory sounds now swallowed up in the dull hum of the central air-conditioner. If I am very lucky, I may be able to turn it off by Christmas and open the house to the sea air.
I have had to tour three supermarkets in search of chestnuts for the dressing, but my determination has finally paid off. The seventeen-year-old at the checkout regards them quizzically before asking me to identify them so she can consult her price per pound list. I cannot but feel sympathy for someone whose holiday turkey will, no doubt, be filled with something that was mixed with water after its removal from a cardboard box or cellophane package. Child of the subtropics, she probably has no concept of things autumnal and of their unbreakable ties to the idea of mortality; if ever the very young do. Perhaps it is only the fact that I have just passed forty that incites me to remember the harvest time—I feel a kinship with it of what lies ahead.
Still, while I am the owner of a fine imagination, I have not yet learned how to pretend that there is snow about me as I cut December's grass. I possess no illusions. I remember well that ice must, inevitably, follow. It is the downside of fall: that even the ending must have its own conclusion. For all its bitter beauty, its abundance, its copiousness, autumn remains the Judas season, selling out its rich promise for winter’s silver shekels.
