Autumn scents send subtle signals every year that it’s time for change

By David McElroy · December 2, 2018

As I turned onto a street leading into my neighborhood Sunday evening, I suddenly felt a gentle feeling of familiar warmth and well-being.

It felt like the inviting call of a fireplace and family. It felt like comfort and safety and love. It felt like the excitement of casting away old things and starting anew.

That was the sensation deep in my brain and that’s what it felt like as those signals spread to my heart. But it was really just the scent of someone burning leaves nearby. My brain and heart filled in the rest, because I’ve come to associate autumn with everything good about home and family — everything I want and need the most — and burning leaves are among the obscure triggers for those feelings.

I love autumn. I love everything from the first of October until the start of the new year. All the things about those three months combine to give me feelings of comfort and hope — along with blind faith that something better lies just ahead.

As I stepped out of my car, the sound of my shoes crunching through the dry leaves — brown and gold and red all around me — reinforced the feeling. I don’t know where the smell of burning leaves was coming from. I’ve never burned leaves in my life. I’m not sure why anybody does it. But I smelled it enough growing up that this is one of those triggers for this time of year.

Scents and sounds and sights such as these are powerful for me. As much as I love words, these sensory experiences trigger things in me more easily than words can. A breeze blowing fallen leaves around as I crunch through them is another of those triggers. The sight of Christmas decorations slowly lighting up at homes all around me — one by one as we get deeper into December — is another.

I need this season of harvest every year. Without consciously knowing it, I’ve settled into counting on each autumn as a time to clear things away in my own life. Every year at this time, I’m coming to a reckoning of what the year has been. I’m mentally clearing the books. I’m considering what progress I’ve made. I’m forgiving myself for my mistakes. And I’m allowing myself to feel hope that what comes next will be even better.

A cynical person might say I let myself off too easily each year, but the truth is that self-forgiveness and starting over are the only ways we can really deal with ourselves, because we humans are creatures of cycles.

In the Hebrew scriptures, we’re told that God decreed a Jubilee year once in every 50 years. The book of Leviticus tells us that slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven and lands which had been lost would be returned to those who had lost them.

Everyone was given a clean slate to start over.

If Jubilee gave the entire society a fresh start, the annual repeating pattern of Nature does the same for individuals. We can each experience a personal Jubilee. We can free ourselves and forgive ourselves — if we dare to do so — and we can start with a clean slate for the coming year.

I haven’t accomplished everything I had hoped for in 2018. I haven’t been as financially successful as I’d planned. I’m not as close to the future I want as I had thought I would be. I haven’t found the love and family which I so desperately need.

But I can’t take those disappointments with me into the new year. I have to start over. I have to wipe the slate clean and give myself permission to hope and to feel blind faith. These sights and these sounds and (especially) these scents are all part of that process. They’re like little rituals which clean out the temple within and make me ready for something new.

So I welcome the burning leaves in the distance. I welcome the crunch of dead leaves under my feet. I welcome a slight chill in the air. I welcome the sights and sounds of approaching Christmas.

These things tell me it’s time to start all over again. They tell me it’s time to hope for love. They promise me that the past doesn’t have to be the future.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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