Autumn is not my favorite season. And not because it signals the end of summer swimming and sailing, or because it presages the cold weather. Winter, especially when there is snow, is my favorite season. For me it’s just that fall’s vibrant colors — the glowing golds and startling crimsons — mark an end rather than a sunny beginning. And this has always seemed to me a bit of a hoax.

The inviting colors of fall should be staying, not going. Sun-colored leaves should linger longer than they do.

I have just had two Swiss house guests whose vacation home is in Evolene in the spectacular mountains of Switzerland’s Valais, the valley of the Rhone River. I wanted the Vineyard to make the best impression, fall or no fall. So I took them out and showed off more than the usual touristy sights of the Island. And through my friends’ eyes, I reconsidered the attractions of a Vineyard fall.

They remarked with delight on the golden coins — the small leaves the beech trees have been generously scattering along Music street. They gathered some shiny horse chestnuts that had fallen. They commented that the gray stone walls up-Island were just the right shade to properly frame the autumn landscape of fields brightened with goldenrod. Since one of my guests is a painter and the other a designer of stained glass, I took to heart what they said about frames of stone walls.

They went repeatedly to ocean beaches, including in Aquinnah where at this time of year the smooth, golden sand seems to stretch on forever. They visited Stonewall Beach, where instead of stones there is sand now too. Equally important for my guest who fishes for mountain trout, striped bass fishermen were busily and hopefully casting their lines.

My friends spent an afternoon watching the blue-green surf thunder at Katama and another day on Chappaquiddick’s East Beach, enjoying the sea and seabirds and admiring the lighthouse. They walked around the pond at the Japanese garden Mytoi, enjoying a different view of the trees in the garden at each turn. They watched swans showing off their fine feathers on the West Tisbury Mill Pond, Canada geese bobbing on the waters of Town Cove and minnows shimmering just beneath the surface.

They watched the sun turn the Sound crimson as it sank into the horizon off Lambert’s Cove Beach one evening. They clambered over north shore stones with Anne Ganz as a guide. She pointed out the tracks hungry deer had made climbing down the sand cliffs to eat seaweed on the shore. They gathered white-circled black pebbles and boat and conch shells and water-worn pieces of brick from the old brickyard. They sadly viewed the grave of a gannet that had swallowed a fishhook and had not survived and had been buried by the Ganzes on shore.

The traffic-stopping flocks of wild turkeys everywhere enthralled them, and when they found fallen feathers they kept them as souvenirs. Just after dusk one day, an owl swooped low enough over Tiasquam road so that they could take a picture of it.

Of course they visited Menemsha and admired the Gay Head Cliffs and went to see the Oak Bluffs Camp Ground cottages and the tall white houses of Edgartown. But at the end of each day as we would head home down Music street, they would remark on how lovely the maple is that turns half red, half golden at this time of year and they would sniff the welcoming wood smoke from the Bird house. They visited the Coynes’s garden and explored its little island of evergreens.

At Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown, they were charmed by the pumpkins strewn about and the cheery pots of yellow and bronze and white chrysanthemums. They delighted two evenings in derby-caught bluefish and freshly picked Athearn corn for dinner. The corn, they said, was sweeter than any corn they had ever tasted.

My Swiss friends had visited New York and the Statue of Liberty before they came to the Vineyard, and went on from here to an afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a morning on the Freedom Trail. They were, of course, impressed by both cities, but before they flew back to Switzerland, they called me to say that the very best part of their American trip had been seeing Martha’s Vineyard decked out in its fall finery.

And like the leaves, my view of autumn on the Vineyard has changed.