It’s leaf peeping time in North Carolina. Looking out from the breakfast room window, the sight is really stunning. At ground level, green grass, and above, the sky is blue, Carolina blue. In between, the leaves on the trees are showing every colour from green to dark red, with golden yellow, bronze and scarlet in between. The changes have reached Winston Salem, and next week the strongest colours will be down near Charlotte, as the leaves fade and fall in our garden.
Looking at the view, it seemed to coalesce with two of my other experiences during the week. But let’s start with autumn colours (yes, US readers, I will spell badly, and call ‘fall’ autumn!!)
When I decided to find out more about the colours of autumn, like most topics I wish I had read about this earlier. There are three sources of colour in leaves: chlorophyll, which I did know about, and the source of green; carotenoids, which produce yellow, orange and brown colours; and anthocyanins, which produce the reds. I learnt that chlorophyll and carotenoids are present all through the leaf growing season, and it is only in the autumn that less chlorophyll is produced, the greens start to fade, the carotenoids are unmasked, and the anthocyanins begin production. And what causes these changes? The process of change is driven by the hours of sunlight: less sunlight, less chlorophyll; less sunlight, anthocyanins start to grow and thrive as excess plant sugars are found in the leaf cells. The brilliance of the colours is more complex, driven by a mixture of effects from temperature and rainfall. Warm sunny autumn days combined with cool nights seem to result in the richest hues. Well, there we are.
The colours of autumn herald the onset of winter, only a few weeks away. And the cycle continues, season’s endings marking time for the next stage: after autumn, the cold sleep of winter, and then everything begins again in the spring.
Cycles and endings. These have been on my mind recently, as a result of what I have been watching and reading. Where should I start? OK, I suppose I have to start with confession time: a rather late discovery, but I am working my way through all the episodes of Bones, the US television series set in the ‘Jeffersonian Institute’ of Washington. I’m on to the 10th season of series, and I’m loving every minute. Loving? Some of the stories are fascinating, some are fun, and some are very moving. It’s been a long haul; as I am now getting close to the 200th episode, watching four of five a week at the most, I guess I started watching late last year! [i]
Bones has many elements. Inspired by the books by Kathy Reichs, it is primarily a crime scene investigation drama, as each week the team at the Jeffersonian tries to find clues through the detailed examination of a corpse! However, it’s a television series, so there are continuing romantic entanglements. Fortunately, the writers, including Kathy Reichs some of the time, (who has had a continuing involvement in the series), have caught some of the detective novels’ insights into the key character, Temperance Brennan, compellingly played by Emily Deschanel.
In the series, Temperance Brennan (Bones) lives in the world of facts, seeing the world through the eyes of a rational, empirical scientist. However, she becomes increasingly involved with her FBI partner, Seeley Booth, a practicing Roman Catholic (and a wizard with guns and other manly stuff!), and married him a couple of seasons ago. Reluctantly, she is coming to terms with understanding not everything she sees can be explained by science. That process of change over the years was all made vivid in the second episode of Season 10, which I saw a few days ago.
To set the scene, the Jeffersonian team of scientists, with Booth, have gathered to give a final farewell to Sweets, an FBI profiler, who had been killed in the previous episode. Daisy, his pregnant partner, is about to cast his ashes to the wind. Daisy comments that Sweets would have been happy to have seen all his friends from the Jeffersonian were there. Booth responds, saying “he knows”. True to form, Brennan disagrees, and before Booth can stop her, goes on:
“I don’t [believe that]. But I do believe Sweets is still with us. Not in a religious sense, because the concept of God is merely a foolish attempt to explain the unexplainable … But in a real sense. He’s here. Sweets is a part of us. Our lives, who we all are at this moment, have been shaped by our relationships with Sweets. Well, each of us is like a delicate equation. And Sweets was the variable without which we wouldn’t be who we are. I might not have married Booth. Or had Christine. Daisy certainly wouldn’t be carrying his child. We are all who we are because we knew Sweets. So, I don’t need a God to praise him or the universe he sprang from, because I loved him. I used to try and explain love, define it as the secretion of chemicals and hormones. But I believe now, remembering Sweets, seeing what he left us, that love cannot be explained by science or religion. It’s beyond the mind, beyond reason. What I do know– loving Sweets– loving each other, that’s what makes life worthwhile. Right now, I don’t need to know more than that.”
It was a great way to handle death, especially as she completed it with a wry final remark: “Which is embarrassing coming from an extremely intelligent, fact-based person”. Go, Bones!
Death is natural, just like the death of those leaves with their brilliant colours outside. Leaves fall to the ground, digested by microbes they turn into leaf mold, a mulch, that feeds the trees from which they fell. The cycle continues. With people, it’s different. Yes, our bodies are returned into nature by one means or another. However, as Brennan says, they live on in us.
I might not have paid so much attention to the Bones episode where it not I had just completed a reading marathon. Philip Pullman’s new book, ‘La Belle Sauvage’ (the first in his new trilogy, ‘The Book of Dust’) had just been published, dealing with the early life of Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of the earlier trilogy, ‘His Dark Materials’.[ii] As soon as I had finished the new book, I had to reread the original trilogy, and that took me, in the final book, (‘The Amber Spyglass’), to that disturbing part of the saga when Lyra and her friend Will enter the ‘Land of the Dead’.
I don’t want to spoil the story, so all I want to do is describe what happens to the dead.
“Old men and women, children, babes in arms, humans and other beings too, more and more thickly they came out of the dark into the world of solid moonlight – and vanished.
That was the strangest thing. They took a few steps in the world of grass and air and silver light, and looked around, their faces transformed with joy … and held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze.” [iii]
Thrown back into the world, to be redistributed into a multitude of living things. At this stage, you are probably wondering ‘where is all this going?’ Falling leaves, dissolving bodies and remembering people, all these made me think of my mother, and the time I raced over to the UK, hoping to see her before she died, as I described recently in some notes I’ve been writing. [iv]
“In the evening, she was struggling … her passing was far from gentle or quick: she fought every inch of the way. Ruby made it clear when she was in Beaumaris that she feared death, and it was obvious she determined to hold on for every last second. When I think of my mother confronting her death, I remember Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”. I think it was one of her favourites; it was certainly how she felt:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Rage, rage against the dying of the light? I’d like to think my mother might have achieved a calmer end if she had read Philip Pullman, heard Temperance Brennan, and thought about season’s endings when she watched the leaves changing colour in the autumn.
At leaf peeping time.
[i] It’s been a challenge, too. When I started Bones was on Netflix. Just as I was getting into the series, Season 2, Netflix removed the first five seasons. I found a free online source, and got to the end of Season 5, and went back to watching on Netflix. Then, on 1 November this year, they removed the rest, just as I was getting to the end of Season 9!! I had to go back to http://watchseries.do/series/bones again.
[ii] I’m providing all these titles, as, if you haven’t read them, all four books should be on your list!
[iii] Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass, Folio Edition in conjunction with Ashton Scholastic, page 386
[iv] Snippets, an autobiography in progress!
