As a gust of wind picks leaves from my favorite maple, I feel a pang of loss. I know it is right and necessary, this stripping away. It is even beautiful. But each year brings fresh feelings of sadness mixed with the joy of autumn’s color.

In our human life cycle, autumn is penultimate, if you’re lucky. After the winter of old age, the party’s over. Nature can start again; we can’t.

My husband reminds me that the fallen leaves promise better views of our treasured eagles. We have already seen their bright heads flashing in the slanting sunlight. Such beauty is our reward for passing through another year.

Our children, with their supple strength, bright faces and flashing minds, provide the same kind of beauty as they grow. Their once-plump baby faces morph into more angular features. Limbs lengthen; curls relax or tighten in direct opposition to the owner’s desire. The child who would not leave my side hankers for distance. Often, that distance yields a better perspective.

Someday, autumn won’t mean back-to-school clothes and loose-leaf paper. Only nature’s markers will tell the seasons for us. We have planted lilacs to give us comfort as we age. They set their buds in autumn, and keep them tightly closed until spring. 

Recently, a friend’s poem about her daughter’s senior year plucked a flood of emotion from me. It will be my turn next to watch a child move away from home.

For now, my son is just aching to drive. I spent last summer chauffeuring him from one place to another, happily deferring my time to his. In a year or so he won’t need me to sit beside him and listen to his plans for the future.

I wonder when I will hear about his feelings for that girl, or the details of his next film, still simmering in his imagination? The time I spend behind the wheel, when I don’t dare let my gaze stray from the winding road ahead, yields a bounty of understanding between us.

During these rides, I find myself giving guidance from the heart that makes up for all the admonitions to “clean your room.” He uses the time well, too, to ask the kind of questions you can only entrust to a parent—everything from the meaning of a word to the meaning of life.

Although it is hard to play favorites with the features of nature, I have a theory that we love the season we are born to. I was born in May; my children were autumn babies. Forgetting the calendar, my year always begins in spring, when the forsythia blooms. My daughter feels affinity for fall. She loves the cool air and crisp apples, and the colors of yellow and red that mimic her own flaming curls. My husband, a Cancerian, revels in the hottest days July can offer.

Here, by the river, the seasons pass so clearly. The river acts as a mirror, doubling the image it reflects. June is twice June from this vantage.

When only the evergreen needles remain on the trees and ice coats the eddy, the eagles will replace boats in number and activity. The long winter will bring a new spring, a new year and another, seemingly briefer, summer. “The years pass so quickly now, Mom,” my son said recently, feeling his age. Yes, Son, they do.