Tenho Saudades

What to say when an american friend writes in his column like this:

Tenho saudades

Columnists,
Article Launched: 10/02/2007 03:07:25 AM EDT
Tuesday, October 2
Dave Mance III

On calendars and in nature columns, autumn is consistently glossed over and rendered exhilarating: The foliage always neon orange against azure skies, humans and their fall chores, the cheerful equivalent of nut foraging cartoon squirrels, busy-busy until winter tucks the earth in like a big fluffy quilt.
As for the dark days — days when a cold wind and driving rain washes the natural world gray — those days don't get much press. Those days we tend to take personally and keep to ourselves.
There's sadness in autumn's decay, in watching the weather take away the familiar. Of course, the season is not literally sad. Intuitively we can differentiate between symbolism and reality. We know, for instance, that the trees aren't really dying as they shake and fall apart before our very eyes. But it's impossible not to feel a kernel of loss as summer's life and vitality devolves into a barren, cold landscape.
Autumn is gorgeous, exhilarating and somber, somehow all at once; a glorious tragedy that brings with it a heightened sense of awareness. This time of year we take walks and revel as the vandal north wind smashes the earth's beauty like a stained glass window. We stop yard work to ponder passing patterns of geese, their mournful her-onking a dirge of sorts: the sad song of the evacuee. We turn animals into meat, that old regeneration through violence bit: stuck hogs in a pile with skinned-over eyes, blood mixing with earth in spiritual symbiosis.
You could say that autumn is a "melancholy" season, but since that word's definition revolves exclusively around sadness and depression, it's not really the right word to use. "Melancholy" misses the joy part in this seasonal sadness. It misses the fierce pride in a full freezer, even as we fondly recall chasing spring piglets. It misses the anticipation of winter, even as we pine nostalgically for the strawberry days of June.
The nostalgia piece is a big part of the season, isn't it? You see ghosts in autumn; they're everywhere: old flames, departed loved ones, memories and images falling through your consciousness like so many falling leaves. Blink your eyes at the river's edge and you're nightswimming again; her pale body emerging to glisten beneath some long-since-past summer moon. Pass a chunk of granite in the forest and you're deer hunting with your grandfather, him sitting motionless in red plaid, forever young, forever with you.
I saw an elderly couple the other day, clutching freshly resurrected sweaters, just staring off at the turning hillsides. How many autumns did this make? I don't know what they were seeing out there, but their look was a long, long way off.
My friend L lives in Portugal and says they have a word in her country — saudade — that is untranslatable in English. She says "saudade" means nostalgia, melancholy and joy all at the same time. You can feel saudade for a person, or a place, or an object. Essentially, the word declares: Your absence has become the greatest presence in my life.
If you live your life through the seasons, I think this might be the right word to describe what you're feeling as you watch the leaves fall.
I put the hogs on a finish ration Sunday, and afterward I took a walk down to the lake for the year's last swim. Crimson maple leaves floated in black water, cold water, water that prophesied the coming winter if you were in the right mind to listen. The earth smelt raw and sweet from decay. The wind carried curls of wood smoke from the season's first fires. Walking the tracks home, our glorious Vermont summer began to feel like a fish story; there was no going back now. Walking the tracks home, shivering against the cool evening breeze, I was thinking about my Grandpop and thinking about four hogs now two weeks from the knife and stumbling through the Portuguese phrasebook that gathers dust in the back of my mind.
Is it "Tenho Saudades," Lena? How do you say: "I feel Saudade?"

Dave Mance III lives in Shaftsbury.

No comments D.