Happy Autumn

Today the very hot, very humid, very hot summer of 2018 leaves us for good.

Good!

Autumn arrives tonight and the coming of my favorite season brings back some wonderful memories.  For example, there was the annual rite of getting into the car and driving upstate to see the autumn foliage.  Yes, the dazzling shades of yellow and orange certainly took the edge off the realization that the trees were going to sleep for a few months, even though it appeared that nature was dying in front of your eyes.  The road trip itself was spent listening to Dad whine/gripe/moan/groan about the price of a gallon of gasoline when gas was still below a dollar per gallon; Mom quietly enjoying her time away from housework, silently gazing at the shower of colors passing by the car window; and you with your sibling in the back seat trying your best to appreciate the drive even while hopelessly bored out of your minds…

Okay, so that memory wasn’t so uplifting.  How about this:

Going to your high school football game on Saturday night.  Your parents would drive because you weren’t old enough to go by yourself.  They would find good seats in the bleachers and curl up together with a plaid blanket Mom still owned from her own high school days.  Yet you could not bring yourself to sit with them.  For one thing it’s just not cool to be seen sitting with your parents and another thing those aluminum seats were just too goddamn hard on your ass.  So, you spent the entirety of the game walking around the track where you might find some of your friends to pal around with, or sight your teenage crush walking around with their friends.  Or you might stop for a moment at the edge of the field and actually watch some of the game where you could see the quarterback get blitzed in a tackle so spectacularly that he would need to be carried off the field on a stretcher.  His parents would have to abandon their goddamn rock-hard aluminum bleacher seats to take the pride of their loins to the nearest emergency room and…

Oh!   Still not feeling warm and fuzzy about autumn yet?   Well, how about this old memory…

Spending a weekend afternoon bent over a rake as you gather up the brown, dried, crinkly leaves in your backyard.  You pile them up thinking you’ll take a break and with a running jump, dive into the pile and scatter the leaves all over Kingdom Come again.  Yet as you finish your chore you feel the sharp pain in your back, reminding you that you aren’t up to making that grand running jump and dive and hinting that there is an arthritic condition in your future.  So, you take out a match, light it up and toss it on the pile.  The resulting fire turns the leaves into ashes with every snap and crackle of the flames.   You stay and watch the fire, your thoughts lost in its small grandeur even as the toxic fumes of the smoke rise up to your face.  You breathe deep this gathering fume allowing you to embark on a future of respiratory issues and heart ailments in addition to the arthritic creaking in your back…

Okay, so try as we might we can’t find a happy memory of autumns past.  Perhaps we could find it in a song.  Alas, I know of no autumn song which instills a sense of satisfaction, let alone happiness.   There is this hauntingly beautiful melody which may sound melancholy, but also cathartic.  After all we should all be able to relate to this singer’s lament of a love lost, I kid you not, to a Martian invasion.

Anyway, Happy Autumn everyone!

(Thank you for reading.  Remember winter is not too far being and it is a season best served frozen!)