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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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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