autumn

The autumn sun has made its first real appearance here since I returned from the East Coast. It’s briskly cool…and, of course, that’s fair, it’s autumn even here in South California after all…but at least the grayness that has hung over my community has gone away for the nonce.

(I’m trying to finish my novel before Thanksgiving…I like the odds of achieving that goal…but I can’t find the muse assigned to that project today so it lingers in the background while I attend to other matters.

I keep myself busy by finishing a review of Santana’s new CD (posted here) , making beef stew and cornbread for supper, and listening to Fiona Apple’s aptly-entitled Extraordinary Machine.)

When I was young (so very long ago), spring was my favorite season but now, fittingly perhaps as amble towards my dotage, I find more to savor with the coming of autumn. The days are shorter and the air is bracing (even here where we have a better chance of getting stricken by lightning than of experiencing a snowfall)…the leaves from the trees in the front yard change color and drift in brittle blankets upon my lawn and walkways…change (subtle and inevitable and inexorable) is all around and it’s all good.

Autumn brings football and rainstorms…and children wandering one magical evening as ghosts and princesses and whatnot (I’m too old for Halloween but not too old for It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and I don’t sweat the irony of that); golden harvest moons and lazy, looming hunter’s moons and a time to slow down (just a bit at least) and reflect…Thanksgiving just in the distance and beyond that the heralds of Christmas and a bright new year…

Autumn…the transition between bright summer and dour winter, the beginning of an end and the end of a beginning…it is, when I allow my practiced cynicism to slip, indeed a magical time.