October Musing

Why do I love autumn most of all the seasons? When days come that are cooler, when the light is more golden and the evenings shorter, when the fields smell spicy with ripe grasses and dried leaves, I feel a return to my truest self. I seek solitude then, I revel in it, striding out across some open place, wind blowing around me like freedom. My soul is more naked, my body strengthening to meet winter, the air clean and energizing.

Some people dread fall as the precurser of winter. Instead, I experience a coming together, a going back to the shelter of home, warmth inside contrasting with cold and dark outside, the light in the window pulling me in from the elements to have soup and cornbread and talk around the table.

I love all the seasons. I do love the lazy warmth of deep summer, the erotic perfume of a warm night when all the smells of leaf and flower are released. But it has always seemed that real life begins again in September. I remember my first romantic breakup in high school, when my boyfriend of a year and a half or so wrote me the final letter. It was fall and I felt strangely liberated. If he had jilted me in spring, I might have been bereft, but in autumn it suited my mood of delicious melancholy.

In autumn everything is distilled. The fruits are ripe to perfect sweetness, grains and herbs dry to essence. Each year we can see the cycle of our lives and come to accept the rhythm. There is a last burst of color and the leaves blow away.