By Charles Davenport

“There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Summer here in the Piedmont of North Carolina is decidedly unpleasant. One could easily summon a dozen terms—blistering, stifling, and suffocating among them—to describe those seemingly endless months of torment.

Mere mortals who dare step outside on a July or August afternoon promptly burst into flames; touching a vehicle’s steering wheel inflicts third-degree burns. Walking outdoors, oppressed by heat and humidity, we drag ourselves, sloth-like, across 120-degree parking lots, rendered blind by the sting of perspiration flowing from our foreheads directly into our eyes. Incredibly, some people actually enjoy that weather!

Mercifully, those days are over. We bid good riddance, at last, to the season of the wasp and the snake. Bring on the lengthening shadows of early dusk, landscapes of yellow, red, and orange, chilly mornings, the smell of burning leaves, and finally, the ethereal silence of a killing frost.

Speaking of which, the late-night stillness of autumn is one of the season’s greatest gifts. The din of a summer evening—the croaking, chirping, and hooting of millions of critters—vanishes, and leaves in its wake a near-absolute, magisterial silence. During the daylight hours, regrettably, summer’s incessant hum of lawnmowers is replaced by fall’s equally irksome, and equally persistent, whine of leaf blowers. Only in the evening hours of fall and winter can one truly revel in silence.

This is not an incidental point. Silence is good for us, physically and psychologically. According to experts at Piedmont Healthcare (a sprawling network of hospitals in Georgia), “One of silence’s most well-known health benefits is its ability to reduce stress levels. Noise pollution has been linked to increased cortisol levels, a hormone associated with stress. In contrast, silence can have the opposite effect by reducing cortisol levels and calming the nervous system.”

As you might expect, Kernersville’s average high and low temperatures gradually decrease during October. According to the website WeatherSpark, our average high on Oct. 1 is 73 degrees, by Halloween, the average high falls to 65. The average low temperature for Oct 1 is 56, which falls to 45 by Oct. 31.

Our friends at NC State report that Kernersville can expect its first frost within a few days before or after Oct. 31. And there is good news for those of us who enjoy cool (even cold) weather: the Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting below normal fall temperatures for North Carolina.

Despite all of its splendor, there is something inexplicably and almost inherently melancholy about autumn. Somehow, the season induces nostalgia, lamentation, and even sorrow, to a greater degree than any other. In my case, a virtual slide-show of my youth appears in my mind, unsummoned, every October or November. It features glimpses of many backyard football games, countless dives into piles of leaves, waiting for the school bus on cold, misty mornings with two or three of my best friends, and those first frosty nights of the season when my family and I gathered around a roaring, crackling fireplace.

For those of us who have entered the autumn of our lives, so to speak, the season’s “bitter-sweetness” increases with every passing year. Try as I might, I have never quite been able to put this phenomenon into words. Poets have taken a stab at it, too. Robert Browning penned a lovely thought on the subject.

“Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.” — Robert Browning

My favorite writer, George Gissing, was a British novelist of the Victorian era. In one semi-autobiographical passage, he finds his favorite walking path “covered with shed blossoms of the hawthorn.” Still beautiful, he observes, and “Creamy white, fragrant even in ruin.”

There is nothing mutually exclusive about decay or ruin on the one hand, and beauty on the other. Quite the contrary. Look out your window, or take a drive down one of Kernersville’s leafy lanes in a few weeks. That visual feast of red, orange, and yellow is a consequence of demise, decay, and ruin.

And it is breathtakingly beautiful.