Autumn reminds me of love. It was the season I met my husband and it was the time of year we married. The smell of a bonfire, the cheering of football games and the brisk chill of fall air takes me back to our first year together – when love was new and wonderful. Love is like autumn in the garden too.
Why Love is Like Autumn
Love is an odd thing – kinda like finding a stray seed at the bottom of the seed box. You plant it never knowing whether it’s your prized heirloom pepper variety or a weedy F2 generation hybrid. It sprouts and grows slowly and surely, like love sometimes does.
Yet, it takes months before you see the first blossom. Then you must patiently wait for the fruit to develop. As it grows, you begin to see the true form of the pepper. Is it your prized heirloom pepper or that weedy F2 generation hybrid? Growing that unknown pepper is so much like falling in love.
And why do we sometimes save hybrid seeds? As gardeners, we know they don’t grow true to type. Yet, I find myself saving hybrid seeds almost in desperation. As if to safeguard against the possibility that I might not be able to buy that hybrid variety next year. After all, at least some of the seedlings will be the hybrid. Or will they?
Don’t we sometimes feel this way about love? We hang on to poor choices hoping to find what we are looking for? But a weedy F2 generation pepper plant will never grow our prized heirloom pepper. It doesn’t matter how many times we go back and check the plant. It’s always the same weedy pepper. Again, so much like love.
Autumn also reminds me of love because it’s the mature stage of the growing season. As love matures, the physical attraction which initially drew two people together transitions into deeper, more meaningful feelings. Isn’t the changing of the leaves similar to the way love changes?
As we head into autumn, the trees cease making chlorophyll. We no longer see the reflected green wavelengths. Instead, the underlying reds, oranges and golds appear. They were always there, but hidden inside the leaf, much like the true character of our significant other. Only when we look deeper, do we see the real person.
But most of all, autumn reminds me of love because it’s the harvest season. We reap the rewards of hard work and preserve our bounty for hard times ahead. Kinda sounds like love there too! The more we put into our relationships, the more we receive in return.
