Quietly Awaiting the Autumn

Happy Vernal Equinox September 22, 2014.

There is no secret to this: I have never liked the autumn. It has always meant the end of carefree days to me. It has meant the end to the summer jobs, the summer mode of life and the introduction of something much more serious or menacing. Autumn always meant school. Everyone I've loved who has died, has died in the autumn. And the quality of light during autumn has an eerie nightmare cast to it, dreamlike in a bad way. Melancholy.

Every few years I think: well autumn ain't that bad. I think this only after an excruciatingly hot summer. After being cooked day in and day out, I feel like I can take the longer nights, the cooler mornings and death in autumn. Every few years I think I should just accept autumn for what it is: September to December.

This year is perhaps no different. It wasn't all that hot this summer here in Colorado. Quite the opposite, actually. It's been a cool wet summer, and that means a long colorful autumn. It's a simple equation: a longer cool wet season means that the trees will hold onto their leaves longer. The longer they hold those leaves as the nights get longer and longer and cooler and cooler, the more colors we're going to see.

Incidentally, this autumn will be the first autumn that we'll be living in our new town. Our new town has plenty of trees. There are three rivers flowing through our new town. At the base of the mighty Rocky Mountains and the promise of a winter to come, this autumn will be most stunning.

This is how I choose to color my autumn:

The Books: Rachel Carson Silent Spring, Normal McClean A River Runs Through It, Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun

The Poets: Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes and Chris Shugrue

The Soundtrack: Rodriguez “Cold Facts”

The Past time: The Holga 120N, cheap imitations of Kandinsky

The Experience: Wandering the rows of rusted American steel in the highway junkyards of Northern Colorado.