As children, my older sister and I would watch a series of VHS tapes called The Wind in the Willows which is also the name of the novel on which these videos are based. I could do some research on the series or the book and provide you, dear reader, with a synopsis but that’s not the point of this piece. What I will say about the series, based on memories now 40 years old, is that it featured smaller animals (a toad, a mole and such) which meant it also featured nature, but not the nature I knew at the time which were the mostly flat lands of Monrovia, the capital city along Liberia’s western coast.
In Liberia, we had dry season and rainy season and I don’t remember ever needing a coat. When we first moved there from London in September of 1983, the heat and humidity were near suffocating for my four and a half year old body. In the early days, we’d return home from church on Saturday afternoons, take off our church-only dresses and lay on our beds in our undergarments. I remember wearing a thin white vest (like a tank top) under my dresses, a vest with a tiny bow on the front that sat on dip of the curved neckline. I remember trying to be still, relax, envision a breeze within our breezeless house. I think of my girls when they were each four and a half and know how impossible that sort of stillness would have been. Ideally, I fell asleep and woke up when the air was a few degrees cooler. Our windows, horizontal slats of glass, were probably cranked open at just the right angle for maximum air flow with our bedroom door ajar for any chance of a cross breeze.
But in my memory, the English countryside featured in this novel by Kenneth Grahame had hills, lush green grass, trees. It was probably cold there. And there wasn’t just a possible breeze, there was wind.
I thought of the series as I reflected on a sound I heard yesterday, the sound of dried leaves flittering across a courtyard that sits below my office window and between our church’s two eating halls. Our church building wasn’t built with eating spaces so, at some point in our history, a building was built across the street. Our offices, conference room and a few other meeting rooms are upstairs and our eating spaces and kitchen are downstairs. I was downstairs showing someone boxes of toys that were given to our church before any of our current pastoral team was working here. So far, no one we’ve asked knows where the toys came from and no one has a vision for how to use them, so we opted to give them away, freeing up much needed walking room in a storage closet.
As I helped move the boxes from the closet into the courtyard so that they could be taken away, I heard the leaves. It was like hearing a song for the first time in a long while, a very familiar tune I’d forgotten I love and the song’s catchiest phrases that I can’t help but belt out.
“The wind in the willows sang softly to me…”
Each episode on the VHS begins with this song. I don’t remember the words so much as I remember the song’s feel, a mix of calm and anticipation. Yesterday’s leaves were the same, a gentle shuffle announcing the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, the end of almost suffocating heat and the beginning of burnt oranges and chocolate browns while evergreens show off their staying power. I’m not one for pumpkin spiced lattes, so I’ll soon mark the seasonal shift by swapping out my summer-only wear for my sweaters and jackets currently housed in the guest room closet downstairs. I’ll figure out ways to help other parts of my home match the shift, a fall themed wreath on the front door, a deep yellow bow on the dining room wall, a navy throw over the living room couch. I’ll create a playlist, bake an apple cake. I don’t have a pillow that says, “It’s fall y’all,” (and please don’t gift one to me) but I have what I need and I’m grateful.