Autumn, Autumn...

Summer is perhaps the most material, corporeal, and static season, when everything is crystal clear, and mother nature indefatigably ministers to our needs. It seems (especially in the heat) that the summer will never end and nothing is or will ever be changing. Yet, as the solstice day has gone and we reach the autumnal equinox, we encounter the fall. Like the bifacial god Janus, it simultaneously looks at the summer and the winter, as if hesitating which side to turn. From then on, every day is uncertain, puzzling, and full of expectations, because this Janus makes an unpredictable decision every day, apparently toying with people.

It is in October that nature puts on especially luxurious, if not outlandish, clothes — perhaps to compensate us in advance for the oncoming monotonous gray-black November. Like a beautiful girl who, before abandoning the worldly pleasures and taking monastic vows, makes her last appearance before the people at her most brilliant and attractive. It is impossible to fathom the wild riot of October colors, hues, and blends. A blue see-through sky stresses the yellow and subdues the crimson tints, setting off the remaining green.

The morning sunshine runs through the fog and clouds that drew a heavy veil over the ground at night, and we see a true miracle: in a flash, the world changes, livens up and seems to emit multicolored rays from within. The morning haze sometimes stays on throughout the day, casting a thin, barely visible, bluish veneer on everything around. This beauty makes you sad, and your heart tries in vain to perceive something unperceivable and will never tell you what exactly it is after.

This season highlights the plants we usually leave unnoticed in summer. Take, for example, the hornbeam, which rarely grows tall and wide-branched in this country. Yet, in the fall, it is the first to promptly change coloring — its leaves turn from green to bronze-red, as if wrought by a smith. Wild grapes redden a bit later, generously ornamenting all the objects they creep over, such as trees, shrubs, stakes, walls and even the ground itself. The birch changes its elegant little leaves for golden coins, while the willow adorns itself with yellow catkins. The thickets of smoke bush strike you in the fall with a variety of colors, from pink to ebony and purple. The chalk-white Holy Hills over the river Donets, strewn with flamboyant smoke bushes, is a sight indeed, when you do not believe your own eyes.

The symphony of colors becomes richer, more radiant, and fabulous with each passing day, its sound reaching the acme, the apotheosis, without a single false note or disharmony. Only the old indomitable oak remain green for a long time, as if challenging the early capitulators. The first to surrender is the Scotch oak: each of its tight green leaves becomes sprinkled with quaint specks.

Trukhaniv Island, especially the part overlooking to the Desna riverside, looks very quiet and deserted in the fall. You can hear the grass, willows and reeds rustling; the last chamomiles are still in flower, the last blackberries and hips ripen, the already sleepy grass snakes lounge around the sun-drenched glades. If you walk quietly, without talking, you can almost bump into a fox with a gorgeous upright tail (why doesn’t it wear it around its neck?), scare off some fussy quails, and meet a poor stork stranded, for some reason, on the island.

The river’s sandy banks, only recently densely strewn with suntanned human bodies and voiced over with booming hi-fis, now seem bare, clean and very quiet — one can hear the spluttering of fish and the gentle rustling of foliage. The fall changes everything — not only the plants but also rivers, rivulets, streams, lakes, ponds, and puddles. Their water becomes extremely clear, transparent and dark on the surface, as is it were spellbound and full of mystery. It gives you joy and some fear to bathe in these black, clear and bewitched autumnal waters which still remind you of the sunny summer days.

When trees begin to drop their leaves, the Dnipro’s right bank in the northern vicinity of Vyshhorod opens a far-stretching blue skyline veiled over by a slight haze. Time has not changed these horizons: even today we can see the centuries-old outlines the way they were at the time of Kyivan Rus’, when our forefathers could also feast their eyes on them while hunting or fishing on the island.

The fall’s magic is unpredictable and ephemeral: a gust of merciless wind or a heavy rainy cloud is enough to change everything, as if a sorcerer had cast an evil spell. Still, for the time being, a quiet and sad atmosphere of leave-taking reigns supreme: nature undergoes the sacrament of metamorphosis. The question is why a human being is unable to do likewise, that is, change, upgrade, and purify him/herself every season?