The sadness always starts about now. I could write the catalogue of tristesse, I suppose. Not melancholy, necessarily. Certainly not Keats' full-bodied apparition. Perhaps I'll tackle Burton someday, and find the spectrum I'm speaking of. But, if I use the French, it's because of the peculiar lightness of the autumnal recession. Later it may grow dark, particularly if I resist - something I've written about here before. But there I spoke of the end of the cycle. Here is the beginning.
            Two days ago, toward the end of my walk, at the so-called Sand Island - actually a spit of land between the Monocacy Creek and the Lehigh River, where the creek swings east and nearly parallels the river - I came up on the beautiful low bank of jewelweed that's been growing there all summer. Sand Island has been a proper park for a decade and more, since the city reclaimed the end-of-the-line ballparks beyond the old tennis courts and landscaped paths and lawns, with a footbridge off the end of the spit onto the towpath. I walk up from the towpath below and cross over into the park. The jewelweed is mixed in here and there in the approach. Mostly the river hugs the towpath as it wends up from the Minsi Trail Bridge, with an occasional wider skirt of wooded land. But the ground widens out toward the mouth of the Monocacy as you approach the footbridge. And just before the footbridge, you usually find the first stands of jewelweed.
            But in the last year or two, volunteers have been clearing the ground - first the steep banks of Sand Island that remained tangled with underbrush after the city finished landscaping the park, and then the ground by the river on the towpath side of the Monocacy. They cleared the embankment above, the first area I mentioned, and I was afraid that this summer, the jewelweed would be mown down. But, while the brush and most of the scrub trees are gone, the old lawn line remains. So this year the jewelweed came up with peculiar lushness, unhampered by the bittersweet and honeysuckle that throve in the scrub.
            They left the beautiful pure white rose of sharon on the towpath side of the footbridge, which, for years, I had been clearing of grapevine, bindweed and honeysuckle. Now it stands more or less alone with a few nearby trees. It has been blooming for several weeks. When you cross the footbridge, you pass up under a canopy of trees. The paths split. On the left you pass out into a lawn and reach the cul-de-sac of the road beside the tennis courts. On the right, you drop down briefly, passing by stairs to a small flat above the creek's rapids. Then you rise again, pass out through some young evergreens and emerge at the embankment of jewelweed.
            All of the jewelweed is yellow now, for some reason. This was not always the case. In the past, the orange jewelweed predominated, with the yellow being relatively rare.

            For me, jewelweed is the end of summer. But jewelweed is also the farm and the springhouse, a time of great sadness and suffering, of first coming to terms with my aloneness and simultaneously struggling with the driving mania of my anxieties. But the springhouse in particular - the original building on the property - sitting below the back of the house, so the house and the terraced yards rose up like an arbitrarily differentiated world from this small stone building set down over the natural fountain spring, nearly at the level with the creek ten or twenty yards behind it. When I looked out the back windows of the second floor - my refuge - I could see the double-trunked hickory on our fenceline, another ten or twenty yards beyond the creek, backed by a rising lens shape of fields replicated by woods and a small peak in the line of the ridge. What I was looking at extended for little more than a mile, at most, and yet that was the natural shape of my life at the time. The whole valley I lived in was perhaps four or five miles long and two to three miles wide. The ridges might have risen two or at most three hundred feet over the valley bottom.
            But the springhouse was enough. And when the summer ended, the springhouse was surrounded by the jewelweed.

            But it's not just the jewelweed. The little trumpets of the flowers, suspended from the middle, with their unique shape and mottling, are the harbinger. But summer ends with the seedpods, little gherkin-shaped pendants, with the seeds darkening in them. For some reason, I think of Emily Dickinson. Undoubtedly she could describe, not only the tiny explosion of the seeds when you touch the ripe ones. She could find the language that simultaneously speaks to the tiny detonation, the tiny release in the spirit, that accompanies the act. Something infinitesimal, a feeling without ground, and yet an inner jubilation whose sureness is precisely its smallness. An end, finally, a conclusion.
            And so, each year at this time, while I resonate with the flowering of the jewelweed, I will end my walk standing beside the plants searching for the ripe seedpods, touching them, goading them, perhaps, tempting them to their sudden minute fusillade. It's something I do until the first serious frost strikes down these most sensitive of plants. As I say, I find a keen small joy in it. But I also find a tremendous sadness.