Fall

It has become apparent that fall has, at long last, arrived in London.

Much to my dismay, might I add, since I enjoy wearing short pants all year for the most part. The air is getting damp, the leaves are sweeping to the ground in little orange and red puddles. The evenings are chilly, and the bottoms of my jeans are often wet and grainy from being dragged all over the city.

It's almost not fair to have to sit in rooms and read about people who are very much alive in the pages of hundred year old texts, people who did things and loved and lived and lived, and we are cooped up and confined to a classroom and a white board, or a power point slide show or a visit to a museum where the professor will butcher a piece that otherwise would have brought a tear to your eye.

Fall always reminds me of walking to my house after school. The bus dropped me off a block away from my house, and I always remember the sudden surge of excitement at the end of the day when the last bell would ring and then that feeling of disappointment, sitting on the bus and bouncing up and down up and down and knowing it would all have to be done again tomorrow.

Walking home in the fall is particularly vibrant in my memory, probably because there are so many smells in the fall. I think there are far more fall smells than spring smells even. There's the smell of leaves, leaves that you couldn't smell all spring and summer and now that they have made their way to the ground you finally get a good wiff. And then there is rain. It rains a lot in the fall, at least in the Northeast (and in London, it is very very damp), and the smell of the rain falling from the sky, clinging desparately to the bare tree branches and the few remaining leaves. It's all very romantic.

I remember walking home and having nothing better to do than to have conversations with myself (this was before I had a car and I would just turn the stereo on high to drown out the thoughts in my head). Inner conversations of course, I'm not the crazy lady who talks out loud to herself (not yet anyway). I'd think about everything from algebra to charlemagne to why life was so hard to how I didn't think I could do it all over again tomorrow. High school was such a drag.

Sometimes while I was walking, I would look around and notice that I was all alone. I live in a bedroom community, my friends and my teachers and my mother know me, but none of my neighbours even know my name. I would feel so utterly alone. And then there would be a gentle breeze, and the leaves would all start to rustle. The leaves would be swept up with the wind, and they would kind of march alongside me, the breeze pushing them along.

The leaves walking alongside me in the gentle fall breeze always made me feel like I wasn't alone, like it was worth it to get up and do it all again tomorrow. I would cut through my backyard, which opens out onto a side-street, and slosh through the muddy grass. The leaves wouldn't roll alongside me in the grass, but it was okay because the gentle breeze remained and, not unlike the warm hugs of summer, the cool breezes of fall are also friendly and gentle in their own way.

It's strange to look back on times like those and think of how insignificant they felt then, and what lasting memories they have become.

I never feel alone in the fall. I feel like someone is watching me, a lot of the time, specifically in the fall, and I can't help but wonder if it isn't my daddy watching me, knowing that these months are the hardest for mom and I to get through. This year will be twelve years since he died. I always say I wouldn't give anything to see him again, to hear his voice, to touch his scratchy face, to play one round of basketball with him, but secretly I would. I know he's in the leaves, he's in the trees, he's in every raindrop and every muddied blade of grass. He's everywhere I am, everywhere I've been and everywhere I'm going. But it doesn't make me miss him any less.

I know it's just me being wishful and hoping that my daddy is watching over me, but I know it's just my heart and my mind playing tricks on me, hoping to see him walking up the path, open the door and catch my eight year old self flying into his waiting arms.

But it's just the breeze, and just the leaves rustling in the gentle changing of the weather. The sky is getting grey and the days are getting shorter. Soon it will be winter, and there will be frost on the bare tree limbs and the flowers will all be long dead.

I do miss being alone and introspective, I hope that there are still lonely and introspective teenagers out there, and that they don't feel so alone when they feel gentle breezes or rain drops that fall on bare cheeks. I hope no one feels so lonely when they hear the leaves rustling in the wind, and that everyone has a marvelously beautiful fall, wherever you are.