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produces the golden haze associated with Indian Summer. Response from readers with knowledge of weather patterns will be reported in this column.
Assistant librarian, Betty Smith, always enthusiastic and ever helpful, directed me to American naturalist Edwin Way Teale. There I found: “Early settlers assumed that the autumn fires of the Indians, burning ' off the prairies, caused both the hazy atmosphere and the abnormal warmth. Hence their name for the season: Indian Summer.”
Betty was also interested in a comment I made which was based on an earlier search into this autumn phenomenon about which many wrote and few defined. Though Indian Summer, I had read, is a time of warmth and gendeness to us, it was a dreaded part of the year for setUers on the frontier. Indian war parties went against each other during this placid weather. They also attacked isolated settlements with fire and death. Betty Smith could find no more on this fragment from my earlier reading. She will keep at it, I suspect. That is her way.
Though the term, Indian Summer, is disdnedy American the period of tranquil weather is also a part of European autumns. The ancient Greeks wove it into their myths about Halcyon, the kingfisherlike bird, fabled as nesting at sea and calming the waves. For the Greeks it was a calm and peaceful time of halcyon days.
For Edwin Way Teale, Indian Summer was “...a time of drifting and reprieve. The very nearness of winter accentuates its charm.” This great American nature writer’s Autumn Across America was published in 1950. I recommend all of this author’s books. Mr. Teale wrote with grace, sensitivity and authority.
Just before I left the library I pulled an imposing and formidable dictionary from the shelf and read, after a now familiar definition of Indian Summer, these words: “Figurative: A time of happiness or success coming late in life or at the end of an age.” That sums it up for me. I am now experiencing my own personal Indian Summer.
John Tmtt welcomes reader comment at P.O. Box 515, Flint Hill, Va. 22627.
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