The Autumn Leaves
Last night as I walked up Glebe Point Road the season felt like autumn for the first time. A fresh breeze was whipping through the trees, whose leaves soughed in that dry rustling that announces the approach of winter (a dry rustling quite distinct from that produced over the course of the summer’s drought). The evenings have been cooling off, and the mornings lately have been less hot as well. Clouds gather overnight, presenting their constituent elements for illumination by the sun at the end and beginning of each day, providing the varieties of color only seen at this time of year. Strange to think that as it warms and thaws back in my previous haunts, here it is curling up for hibernation. Well, maybe not hibernation. In fact, although there are deciduous trees here somewhere, all the leaves are green still. There’s more rain and cooler weather, but no color change in the plants and animals. It feels like the last days of August, just before school was to start, days when I’d want to go swimming or spend the afternoon among trees, intent upon summer activities that would soon be strange: the beach was never the same in September as in July, no matter what the temperature was. It was as if the world turned itself upside-down within its envelope of air, and we breathed a different atmosphere than we had been. And now I live where that air came from, and the world has turned again, so that I inhale the northern hemisphere’s former season, and they begin to breathe ours, an exchange of respiration newly strange to me again.