Warm, summer-like temperatures descended on St. Louis this past weekend, so I took the bike for a ride and visited the Missouri Botanical Garden near Tower Grove Park, only a few miles from here. I could actually leave my bedroom windows open all day, it was so warm. The smell of decaying leaves is rich, bringing back memories of autumns at the College of St. Thomas (now "University") in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and even far back in our family's history into West Haven, Connecticut. After my ordination in September of 1982, a fellow priest and I toured the foliage in New Hampshire for a few days, too.
Walking through the portals and into the leaf-carpeted chambers of yellowed and reddened trees is
like entering another world, whether it's a tree-lined street in residential areas or out in the countryside. This is a time where smells and colors bring me back to a happy nostalgia, recalling vivid memories of leafpiles and pumpkin-carving. The images are renewed, charging me with a quiet joy.
The botanical garden is a regular Disneyland-type theme park, with separate 
areas--one for rose bushes (still blooming away!), another for tropical plants (under a geodesic dome opened in 1960), an English countryside park, and a vast Japanese garden that included a small waterfall, bridges, zen gravel patterned gardens with miniature trees, and island in the middle of a small lake, and various shelters for meditation. This last area must be as beautiful to visit in one season as in another--now, in fall, the colors of the small maples and other bushes are intense, and I would love to see it under a fresh snowfall, as well.
Lots of families and couples wandered about, and a wedding party lingered near the dome, by a long 
reflecting pool. Glassworks by Dale Chihuly festooned the gates on either side of the rose garden half-circle with yellow sunbeam-like crowns. The sun streamed through the windows of the restored Shaw country estate, on the grounds (ca. 1839), and over the leaf-strewn surfaces of ponds and pools.
It's the kind of place that doesn't seem to want to let you go away. Indeed, a lot of the streets I passed through beckoned, shaded and toned perfectly in autumn harmony. God touches us deeply in such times of transition between the heat and the winter ice, a time of grateful remembrance and wistful anticipation of promised life to come.
