When Every Leaf Is a Flower
On autumn, memory, and the comfort of return
What is your favorite season of year? Why?
✍️Author’s Note
This short reflection began with a familiar prompt: What is your favourite season? At first, I hesitated, since autumn has appeared before in my writing. But perhaps that hesitation is part of the answer. Nature itself repeats its questions every year, yet never in exactly the same way. The seasons return, but each return carries another light, another memory, another mood.
Autumn remains my favourite season, not because it is a season of decline, but because it is a season of colour, maturity, silence, and balance. It reminds us that beauty does not belong only to beginnings. It can also appear in ripeness, in memory, and in the quiet acceptance of life’s rhythm.
— WJJH
LETTERS TO THE PROMPT
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
— Albert Camus
The prompt, with its inquisitive mind and its talent for returning to familiar ground, has asked a question that seems simple: What is your favourite season? Yet the question is not entirely innocent. It risks inviting repetition, especially when autumn has already found its way into earlier reflections. But perhaps repetition is not the weakness of the question. Perhaps it is its quiet truth.
Nature itself is built on repetition. Spring returns, summer ripens, autumn withdraws, winter waits. Yet no spring is quite the same as the last, no autumn repeats the exact colour of a former year. The seasons follow each other as the phases of life do. They cannot really be understood in isolation. Each carries the memory of the one before and the promise, or warning, of the one to come.
If I must choose, then my answer remains autumn.
As a former runner, I have always felt a special affection for that season when the days grow shorter, the nights longer, and the world begins its slow transformation. The leaves turn into warm earth tones, the air sharpens, and the landscape takes on a quiet maturity. Albert Camus expressed it beautifully: “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Especially in the early morning, autumn has a particular grace. Walking through the woods at dawn, when fog rises over the meadows and ponds, and dew still rests on the leaves, the noise of the world seems to fall away. There is a silence there that is not empty, but full. It creates, at least for a moment, a connection between man and nature.
Autumn also has its deeper meaning. With winter looming, it represents the beginning of the end, but not in a tragic sense. Rather, it is the season of splendid maturity, of balance, of nature gathering itself before surrendering. It does not resist decline; it gives decline colour.
For me, autumn also carries memories: the Indian Summer of New England, the adventurous years in Munich, Toronto, and Zürich, the long walks, the changing light, the feeling that life was still wide open. Perhaps that is why autumn speaks to me. It is not only a season of ending, but also of remembrance.
So yes, autumn is my favourite season. But only because it reminds me that every season belongs to the whole. Spring promises, summer fulfils, autumn reflects, and winter teaches patience.
And at this stage of life, reflection has its own beauty.
October, 2026
📌Blog Excerpt
The prompt, with its inquisitive mind, sometimes returns to familiar ground. But perhaps repetition is not the weakness of the question. Nature itself repeats the seasons, and yet no autumn is ever quite the same. If I must choose a favourite, it remains autumn — the season in which every leaf becomes a flower.
