Autumn agrees with me. Or more accurately, I agree with autumn.
Mostly, I guess, it’s because my birthday is September 13th — timed perfectly to coincide with the start of the school year. As a kid, I’d look forward all year to being a year older, rounding up over the summer. This trait has persisted into my adulthood – many years now, still, I wait and claim to be the age I’m going to be, as early as less than 6 months after my birthday the previous year. And of course, as a bookish sort, I’m also dying to dispense with the anticipation of school and to actually get down to the nitty-gritty and nuts and bolts of making pretty things with my mind.
I think autumn is easily misunderstood. Children are often thought of as loathing the end of long sunny days and dreading the drudgery of returning to school. Not me. For me, the year, and life, really starts when the summer ends.
This year is particularly special. Here in Vancouver, it has very quickly transitioned into a blustery autumn. I’m living in the neighbourhood where I grew up as a child, when I first developed my taste for reading. I’m about to embark in the academic tradition of pursuing graduate studies in community and regional planning. I’ve had just enough time to survey the mountain of effort in front of me, and am about to plant my foot down for the first step on the path, savoring the last few unencumbered moments. My jaw is set. My eyes are ahead.
Do I sound like I have a bone to pick with summer? Maybe I do a little bit. It’s taken me a few years to grok it – fittingly enough, in what many might call the summer of my life. I get the sense that summers will continue to make more sense as I inch, ever-so-slightly, towards grokking how to live in the moments, and to enjoy things for the sheer heck of it. I have some cruft around that. I’m generally suspicious of the whole proposition and anything that has to do with it.
Autumn is gorgeous. Simultaneously, both a surprise and the slow sigh of a held breath. Look at what we never expected. Look at what’s to come. It’s a reckoning, a settling into the task and travails. It’s birthdays crashing on a shore, one after another. It’s the ideas and the love and the stories that persist long past our obsession with perfect and primes.
Days for tomorrows. Let’s harvest.
Image by jarek69.
