THOSE FALLING LEAVES

Hanns F Skoutajan

It’s not real, the colours that are now emerging along the city avenues and throughout the countryside.

Many years ago when I was  a student in Germany my parents sent me a bundle of prints by the Group of Seven. I decorated my room with these paintings and invited my fellow students to my chamber turned art gallery. 

“Its not real,” they remarked,” the colours are too bright and undisciplined.” Used to the more classical traditions of art  they were skeptical of the work of Canadian painters. One would have thought that Van Gogh  and the Impressionists would have prepared them for something more lively.

My family came to Canada and settled on an abandoned farm in northwestern Saskatchewan. There was little of fall colour there. Poplars haven’t  a very imaginative nature. A few years later, after the war’s end my father sold our quarter section of dirt and bought a brand new, post-war Chevy that allowed us to peruse the eastern Ontario countryside where we had come to live. Thus in the fall of 1947 we first experienced the colours    that exploded along the banks of the Trent River and the plethora of lakes of Hastings and Frontenac counties. We had never seen anything like it, but we knew that it was very real. This, our new homeland was a land of colour.

We have a few more weeks to marvel at our environment before a blanket of snow covers and warms the ground for another season. For five falls I enjoyed the campus of Queen’s University  in Kingston where the colour of leaves in Macdonald Park mingled with the grey limestone buildings on the Old Ontario Strand. Now living in Ottawa across the river from wonderful Gatineau Park I cannot help but be reminded of our precious heritage.

In the last chapter, indeed, the final paragraphs of my book Uprooted and Transplanted, I briefly describe my arrival “back home.” I and a group of expatriates who had fled the Nazi take-over of our Sudeten homeland 50 years earlier, were coming to the end of our nostalgic visit to our land of birth.

“Our plane wings its way over Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. Time stands still as the sun hovers just above the left wing of the jet for quite some time. By mid-afternoon we had crossed the sea and were approaching land and descended to Robert Stanfield International Airport in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“As we skim over the tree tops  short of landing I behold the glory of the autumnal colours. We are home  where new tasks await us  ‘ to stand on guard‘ as the Canadian national anthem  has it, to be a socially responsible people in a land where all too often      we forget  that, like our natural resources, humans are precious. Let’s not abandon each other.”

No other time than the autumn are we made aware of the wealth of our natural environment. The rich red of the maples  that mix and blend with the green and panorama of other vegetation, the shimmer of the waters of lakes and rivers and the autumn sky, cannot help but enthral us. We have a few more weeks to marvel at nature’s annual  miracle. 

‘To stand on guard’ sounds rather militaristic but it is much more than that. It means striving to keep our waters clean, protecting our trees from the developers shovel and our air pure from contamination by industry. 

Each evening I observe a groundhog feeding on the plants in the park behind our home. Its his too. We share our land not only among us humans but with all living creatures.

The spirituality of our First Nations people is much more closely linked to their environment than is found among western religions for whom the environment is something to be exploited,  except perhaps among the Franciscans whose patron St. Francis after whom the new pope has called himself. Hopefully he can awaken Christians to a greater appreciation of the beauty and sacredness of all creation.    

“Balance” is the name of the game. My fellow students in Germany  who admired (? ) the art of A Y Jackson, Tom Tomson  and J E H MacDonald  failed to notice   that there was a balance on the artists palette. Later on coming to Canada they sense that this riot  of colour was very real indeed. And its coming soon, Enjoy! Preserve! 

SQ O8/09/2013

Also see MYQUEST