Autumn

The world is a convertible…best lived in the open air, the fresh cut wind tinged with the scent of firewood ablaze in an afternoon…

Summer slides over to let her sister, Autumn, slide past her in the seat beside.

The afternoons tilt earlier.  An apple falls.  Suntans fade.

The radio plays a song that conjures up a memory like dust being blown off of fine china.  Crisp and white, fine-bone…and in that arc of minutes as the song plays it feels like somebody just tossed those dish-plates off of a front porch to splinter and crash onto a driveway no longer heated by a summer sun.

Autumn is the color of a pumpkins eyes lit behind by a candle.  Her sister, Summer is blonde.  Autumn…well Autumn is Auburn.  Hair flecked with hints of colored leaves and earthen tones. She is blindingly more beautiful, her dirt-colored eyes reminders of how she buries the summer seeds and simply waits for Spring.  She lets you feel an afternoon warmth but cools you in the evening blues.  Overnight she taints you with a glaze of frost…perhaps to remind you of her aloofness.  Untamed.  Mercurial.  In a season of vines and stalks dying Autumn is a gatherer…pulling you deep into the ground. 

We scurry to find our hearts like kids in masks scurry for candy.

We feel the break of leaves under our feet.  We fan fires, hoping embers can reignite and bring some warmth to a suddenly cool room.

We find fault in Autumn as we reminisce of summer…we remember beaches and turquoise waters and now we only see the oranges and rubies, the scarlets and the salmons.  The colors are so glaringly close to each other these become shades of each other. 

There was a point where we were so close that we were blended colors of each other.

In winter there is only blacks and whites.  Autumn melds us…molts us.  We blend.

We blend like a leaf falls a thousand feet to join others, to nestle amongst the grounds and slumber peacefully.

The world is a convertible…we breathe in the changes in the season.  We cling to an outdoors to remember last season.

You were my calendar…my work week, my day to day.  You were my calibration, the expectation of a sunrise and a sunset.  The minutes, the slight nuanced changes of the day due to the season.

You were the colors.  You were the high foliage blooming beautiful.  You erased the humid summer.  You smelled like home.

Each year….goddamned each year I looked forward to the season of you.  The change, the aging, the gradually getting more beautiful…impossibly beautiful in the age of a year.

Autumn is a reminder of some things that are dying, and some things that are returning…if we only have such daunting patience. 

And there is the sensation that I am but one of those leaves…a bit discarded, set aside.  I tumble…I crumble beneath a footstep.

But perhaps in those brief turning moments I am attached to something more beautiful than I could ever be by myself.

The world is a convertible…breathe it in as you speed by.  It has its scents.  Particularly after summer.