A swallow stirring

Having spent the first large chunk of my last entry discussing my feelings on how little I regard seasons other than Summer, I would like to begin this entry by saying that I have begun getting the stirrings of Autumn in my sinews and they always spark a special kind of excitement in me. I admit that I find myself a little angry at Summer this year. September sixth is entirely much too early for Fall and I wonder what Summer’s rush is. I am frustrated with myself, too, for the excitement that I feel. This happens to me every year. The changing seasons work a magic on me and I am ready for whatever comes. Especially Fall. But it is also with Fall that I regret the most. Because several weeks or a couple months, or even sometimes only a day or two in, I think back longingly upon Summer: warm feet and boogie boarding and...well, you know all about that, and I spend the rest of the year missing her. So there, that’s just how it is. I am angry and frustrated and sad and yet somehow tentatively inspired by the Autumn smell that keeps blowing in my window this week. As Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself... ”

If I could, I would let the seasons change every three months, as is their wont, but each time they would change to a new season for merely a few weeks and then they would faze right back into Summer. It’s bland of me, I know. And ungrateful. Peter Spier wrote a children’s book called People in which he talks about how boring it would be if everyone and everything were all the same, lacking different cultures and tastes. And doubtless, seasons fit into this concept as well. It is boring and unenlightened of me to want it to be Summer all the time. Perhaps it is immature. But in this, I concede to being childish. I don’t think I can help it. You see, I’m love struck.

But that being said. There is something old that awakens in a young soul at Autumn’s dawn. It is timeless and pecular and sage. Perhaps it is Fall itself, unfolding inside us and greeting her other half without. It whispers of nostalgia, and of a deep-rooted and unyielding joy as boundless as the world itself. It’s a swallow, and a wild rose, and a misty grey mountain, and a falling russet leaf. It is unsettling and invigorating both at the same time. It is greater and stronger and older and wiser than I, but it is in me, then, at the turning of the seasons, for a brief spell, while Fall emerges.

And then there is the sound of football playing on the TV, the only time I can appreciate ambient television noise while I am going about my everyday life. And really, if it’s Fall time, something is sorely missing without it. It’s the sound of the cheering and the whistles that makes you think of huddling around the screen, waving Terrible Towels and munching on football snacks and sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows and tiptoeing outside in a scarf to feel the blustery chill of pre-dusk and the smell of cold that reminds you that you are alive and makes you love everything. It’s the sound of yelling from the next room that makes you jump out of your seat so high that you hit the ceiling and then in the same motion bolt out to catch the replay of whatever you just missed. And for me, now that I’m out of school for the time being, it’s the free and beautiful feeling of not having to bury myself in school work just at the moment when I feel most like curling up under a blanket and indulging in my own personal thoughts and enjoyments instead of some aggravating instructor’s incoherent syllabus.

Don’t get me wrong, Fall, this message goes out even to lovely you, I am yet unwilling to wave the Summer of 2010 farewell. The sand was still warm when I roamed on the beach yesterday and I can still smell bonfire some nights wafting down PCH from Huntington. We are barbequing burgers tonight, Summer dear, and my boots are tucked artfully away in my closet for another day. It’s still only preseason. All I’m admitting is this: in the days ahead, when my feet turn numb and hunker down into the wool hiking socks that I stole from Jason for the rest of the year; when the Summer beach tourists fade away and parking on Main Street is no longer impossible and damp wind sweeps in from off the ocean so strong and chilly that it numbs the nose in the crash of a wave; when my heart comes to that sad, sad, sadness of Summer gone and that restlessness wedges in my bones and makes me miss things I have never had; when lady Autumn is truly upon us, you’ll find me perched on my bed by the window, breathing in the crisp, sweet air, with a good book and a cup of tea and perhaps a foxish little cat sitting on my feet; and I will be okay.

-R.E.A.