Naturalist time

In the fall of 1996 I remember thinking: How did it get to be the late '90s suddenly?
I was in Bulgaria, of all places, and had been since two summers past. In 1996, the year 2006 seemed like an ice-age away, though I had given it some formless thought the same way in 1986 I gave formless thought to '96.
Now, 10 years later, it's fall again. Years pass like seasons. They pile up gradually like waves on a beach until suddenly it's high tide.
How did that happen?
It's not that I can't remember the water being halfway up the beach. I can. Between 1996 and 2006, we flew across the Adriatic Sea to Italy, watched the first red sun of the new millennium rise over Belfast, spent a year in Shanghai.
I remember 1986, too. That September, near the building in Portland where I managed a publishing company, a spectacular and melancholy patch of sunflowers was growing by the railroad tracks. Afternoons I stood in the lobby looking out the windows at those sunflowers, neglecting book budgets.
Fall, 1976: I was trying to learn Italian at the University of Southern Maine. On a still, sunny day in early October I sat on a picnic table by a lake in Gray and stared at blazing red and orange maple trees reflected as clear as a mirror on the water. You could not tell the water from the woods.
The fall of 1966 is less distinct, though I can piece it together from major events, like the time I realized what Paul Simon meant by the sound of silence. The fall of 1956 I know mainly by hearsay, though there is a photo of my sister and me sitting in an October field on Chebeague Island, with sunlight in our hair and sweaters. That day the woods and field were unbelievably beautiful, though I don't remember thinking so. I remember running around in it.
Fall that day was early morning to two little kids.

Life moves like a year. The average lifespan in Maine is just over 75. Seventy-five has three parts, the way 12 months have three parts.
The span from birth to age 25 is one-third of an average lifetime, like the first four months are one-third of a year. You're born in a world of light and dark like January, and grow like winter daylight. At 5 or 6, your lifetime's first month has passed. At about 11 you've reached the end of February. Daylight is increasing. The ache and turmoil of adolescence are exactly like the thaw, mud and awakening of March. Turning 18 is a warm April Fool's Day, and spring unfolds.
May blossoms with the energy of a 25-year-old starting to produce. The sunlit peak of your 30s is June. Your early 40s are the flight through July - high summer, heat, and sometimes hail. It's not that it doesn't rain. My 4-year-old son slept in my arms in the back of a leaky Bulgarian van during a thunderstorm. I protected his head from the drops.
By August's end comes the clarity of half a century. In the clear September air and reddening leaves, is visible all of what came before. By mid-October the world prepares to retire. A storm can wither and strip the leaves in a night. November is like 65, with cold that stiffens your limbs, and sometimes snow. At the Christmastime solstice, the light ebbs lowest. At that moment, unseen, the sun rekindles. The tide turns.
The green leaves turn brown and crumble in your hand. How did it get to be fall suddenly?