Falling

                                                                           

October is my favorite month. I'm a sucker for melancholy. For ruminating. For mulling. Okay, yes, for overthinking.  

I suspect this is why I love fall.

Autumn is a thumb-sucker's season. The perfect climate to recline under a crimson tree and consider all that has come before and imagine what might arrive after the final faded leaf has tumbled to the ground.

It is definately not summer, when being in-the-moment is all that is required -- all that you can manage in the grip of searing heat.

In autumn, even while marveling at nature's vibrant palette, the mind cannot stop wandering. It simply cannot stop knowing that another year is coming to an end and dusky days are ahead.

In the small New Jersey town where I grew up, there was a maple treee along the road leading home from grammar school and it exploded with exquisite foliage every fall. The leaves on this particular tree turned colors so vivid, they looked as if they were popping out of a Maxfield Parrish painting, especially against a canvas of severe-clear blue-sky days.

But even a grammar school kid knows that by early December, when the light is withholding and chills become shivers, the maple will once again turn as dark and bare as the asphalt below.

It is the whirligig of life, after all. Unstoppable.

So, excuse me as I go off shomewhere to ruminate, mull, overthink.

In fact, this fall just might be the right time to go back to the old neighborhood and see if that special maple tree is still there, still showing off its technicolor fancy dress for free.