Tumbling into fall.: seanan

Tumbling into fall.

Here in California, the blackberry brambles are putting out their last, sweetest berries, the ones that taste like an entire summer crammed into less than a single bite of fruit. The season's scant burden of tomatoes is ripe and colored like a thousand bonfires, coming in from the fields a bushel at a time. The butterflies are migrating down the coast, toward warmer climes; the department stores are dressing themselves in orange and black, like a season of mourning for our departing monarchs. Stray cats sun themselves later into the afternoon, because it takes that much longer for the concrete to warm up.

Summer is ending.

I always feel a little wistful this time of year. Autumn is my favorite season; I love the colors of the world, the constant taste of rain and bonfires in the air, and the seasonal ice cream flavors that inevitably cluster in the supermarkets. I love Halloween. I love the buildup and the teardown and everything else that comes with it. But still, the summer's ending. The rains are coming, the snows are coming, the harvest is coming in. Lily Fair only holds her court for a few months at a time, and then it's Snow White's turn for days on days, and then Rose Red again. We have so little time here, it makes me wistful to know that no matter how much I love it, it never lasts.

The orb weaver spiders are building their webs against the winter. The squirrels are squirreling away everything they can. The crows are singing songs of the cold days to come. And I'm watching my temporary country come around again, and I have my passport, and I'm an autumn girl; it's been too long since I've been home.

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the_s_guy

September 16 2009, 13:48:58 UTC 7 years ago

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Autumn seems... relaxing, a little, to me. The swollen busyness of summer has backed off, there's a sense that the day, for now, is drawing to a close, and it's time to hang up the work tools and step out into the cooling hours to dusk. The world is putting down its burden for a moment and taking a breath tinged with the fading strong greenery of summer and the first hints of coming frost, but with a deep, satisfying, earthy, complex, and layered melange of its own.

Myself, I'm a winter guy. The deep, deep, winter, where everything has been scoured down to its bones and the air contains nothing at all but itself and ice. When the world seems to have stopped, timeless, and there's room to think vast, glittering thoughts, fragile and ephemeral as snowflakes, amongst and between the quieted minds.

seanan_mcguire

September 16 2009, 14:05:43 UTC 7 years ago

I get cold too easily to be a very good winter girl. I sit around shivering and being baleful at people until they light things on fire to appease me.

September 17 2009, 01:05:20 UTC 7 years ago

Ah, yes. I'm afraid I have much the opposite problem, or at least used to - I apparently had some kind of built-in nuclear reactor which allowed me to walk around in tees at 3am in the dead of winter with the wind howling down off the snowcaps.

In summer, of course, I retreated to anywhere with aircon and let the thermophiles have their time in the sun.

September 17 2009, 04:29:55 UTC 7 years ago

...wow. GO TEAM SOLAR POWER!

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Tumbling into fall.

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