It's Spooky Season

It’s spooky season, and the weather follows suit in a perpetual state of preparing for storm. A hazy filter settles over the world, casting pearl on the clouds, and brown on the fields, and bleakness in the horizon. Yet the vibrant fall colors reveal a deeper hue in light of the absent sun. The vivid autumn hillsides can make any town look like a New England one.

I pass through a gateway of yellow trees with leaves that flutter down to take their place in the golden lacework that artfully litters the ground. Red as cherries, yellow as candlelight, orange as the fruit, and golden as honey; I suspect that leaves are one of the rare subjects in the circle of life that arrive at their full beauty in old age. And even when they depart from their origin branches, the woody aroma of their decay is the nicest smelling of deaths - the seasonal incense of the earth.

I see spiderwebs stretched in expert designs across the clearings that host fresh beds of soil and nuts for creatures to forage. Squirrels and chipmunks dart excitedly in and out of the forest bramble, unable to keep quiet on the crunchy autumn bed. And cawing black crows flap amok, rustling the trees, and encouraging leaves into their downward journey perhaps quicker than they would have preferred.

I wander onto a cool, rocky forest shore. A stormy silvery sea ripples and churns, beating with deep sounds against the wind-washed rocks. The usually still blue water is intimidating worked up in this powerful clamor. And with the thought of its majesty, goosebumps rise on my skin, as a timely easterly gale whips and howls grayly around me, imploring me to find shelter before the droplets come.

But I can’t move a muscle; though nature, it seems, can’t bear to sit still. So daring not to upset the beautiful rhythms I see, I sit unmoving and still as can be, right in the glorious thick of it.