09 October 2009

fall arrives

And so comes the fall. It seemed to switch over just on my birthday. My last day of 29 was summer, and my first day of 30 was fall, very nearly. I'm starting to see red peeking out on trees, and the angle of the sun has changed so that I can no longer sit in the sun in the park. Now, on my lunch hour, the park is in the shade. I'm starting to try to store up the sunlight. When I see the sun come out, I want to rush out to bask in it, hoping to collect enough golden light to take me through the winter.

I could do without autumn completely. I would be perfectly happy with eternal summer, despite the man at my favorite coffee place who said Wednesday, "But then things wouldn't be green!" because it so seldom rains in Gone West in the summer, and I sighed wistfully and said, "I used to live in Rwanda, where it's always like a [Gone West] summer, except that it rains about an hour a day and it's always green. I never got sick of it. My mom would tell me about the rain and the snow and the wind in Michigan, and I was always happy to be in Rwanda's perfect weather."

I'm trying to tell myself, this year, that autumn is part of the natural cycle of things, of death and rebirth in nature. That might work better if I were not a person who has spent 13 years in Africa. I know the tropics, you see. I have spent Thanksgiving eating under starlight in warm air. I have spent Christmas sweating in a revival tent. The thing about the tropics is that there is no winter, and things are just fine. So I can tell myself that winter is a necessary time for the plants and the animals, but I know that it doesn't have to be that way.

The only thing to do, when the light and colors begin to fail you, is to soak up the light and color that remains. The sunlight is more precious when you catch only a few minutes of it, sitting in a different park. The flowers are more valuable when they are the last remaining few. For now, there are colorful leaves. The sky is still blue more often than not. I'm trying not to panic about winter. Yet.

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