Welcome to fall: This, to me, is sheer poetry...

Stop me if you've heard this one before...because I probably wrote it on here.

Each October, my mind wanders to an R. Crumb drawing on the cover of Arcade magazine, a long-ago compendium of underground comix. On it, a beatnik (wow...remember that word?) roams down a street and a solitary brown leaf zips by him as the sun sets, to which he says, "This, to me, is sheer poetry!" (Oh, hell...why am I describing it? This is the age of the Internet. You can find ANYTHING. Here it is, at left.)

I miss the sheer poetry of fall. I live in a place where sunshine and warm temperatures are almost eternal, where a drop of rain is reason to celebrate. I'm sure leaves actually change here in the fall, and float languidly to the ground, but I've never actually seen it happen.

When I lived in Pittsburgh, I lived on this great tree-lined avenue and each year the leaves would fall in buckets. You could walk up or down the street and slog through them, like snow or sand, leaving trails through the piles of them. They crunched underfoot, a loud, snappy, satisfying crunch, not unlike a bowl of cereal. They were orange and red and yellow and bright and the crisp temperatures that accompanied them and quickened their demise made it all seem so perfect. All was right in the world when fall came and the leaves dropped, and then again, when spring came and they came back.

I miss all of that, but because of those memories, October will always be my favorite month. Before the snow came, before the temperatures dropped to below freezing and farther, before we all huddled up inside and only went out when we had to, and before I moved to a place where none of that mattered, October heralded my favorite time of year: Fall. It always will be, regardless of where I live.

This year, I'm going to recapture fall. Stay tuned.

Comments

[Pam]

Indeed, autumn is a wonderful time in the year,I visited Copenhagen several times in october and the sun there in the north is like gold dripping down....
here in germany you can wander through the golden leaves....no wonder there are so many (old time) german poems about that time!
Looking forward to read more about autumn from you!