Concerning Autumn

Autumn, to me, feels like an exhale.

It’s the earth taking a moment to breathe after the heart-pounding rapture of a full summer, after the gold and green days of glorious, blazing sun. It’s the world sighing its way into the fresh snap of cool mornings and the artist’s pallet of swirled ocher, burnt sienna, and crimson, the season’s color wheel, all while the first frost begins to settle its crystal fingers on the front door stoop, winter trailing close behind.

Autumn brings new texture to our lives. It sharpens the world in bright hues, in beds of leaves that crunch and crackle, in round acorns that press into the moist soil beneath our boots; it livens the air with the scents of spice and of newness and of sweetness, or the nutty aroma of roasted pumpkins seeds. It begins with a gentle awakening in the night, when grey clouds brush their way across the sky and we wake to them softly blanketing the earth, prompted forward by a cool breeze the sends the leaves shuddering down from the treetops.

It is a sigh, a moment of rest, of both rebirth and a silent slipping away of the viability of summer. It’s a time to store, to gather, to speak face-to-face, to wrap hands around warm mugs and listen to the cadence of a loved one’s voice while they tell you of their hopes for a white Christmas. It’s a time to be childlike, to throw on sweaters and run laughing through fields of goldenrod and Joe-Pye weed, to purposely shuffle your feet just to hear the rush of the fallen leaves coating the ground in color.

Autumn is fire and cold and warm bread and cocoa.

It is shivering hugs, a dash of cinnamon, and turning the heater on for the first time.

It is drizzly rains and holiday shopping and coffee mugs sending wisps of steam curling into a clear shaft of morning sun.

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Do you have a favorite season? If so, which one?

Cheers,

Alicyn