I am so ready for autumn days. The cool crisp air. The way the light changes somehow, making everything a certain kind of resplendent. Cozying up in the evening as the sun fades. Making warm meals and soups. Debating if it's time to turn on the heat but opting to keep relishing the chill a little while longer – while it's still a choice.
Fall enlivens my heart each year. Even if it's inevitable to lead into winter's harshness, for some reason it refreshes me. Though it never feels like it stays long enough. All of a sudden the sky loses that glow and all the colors disappear for the monochrome. Oddly, I find myself craving that too.
Of all the things to stir such a longing in me, I was looking through my photos from 2017. To say that was a rough year is an understatement. A few good things got their start that year but I was in the low for most of it. It's sort of when I say it all started. I was sometimes putting on a happy face (more times than I can recall, I'm sure), and some others, clinging to something rare and small and quietly joyful. It was a year of loss, struggle, challenge, and loneliness. All the pain of that time began in the cold season.
I feel myself longing for such a season, to curl up with my grief in. To not have the sun guilting me in constant, but to cherish its sparse rays. To be in a time that things around me are cold and unknown, but there's a promise of familiar vibrancy ahead. That I don't have to believe in it, it will just come. And carry me along with it.
My heart is in winter. And so it longs for winter around me. To give me space to hide away with my grief, and eventually to melt the dull, harsh grayness in reveal of whatever winter held in place with its chill. Preserved through a biting freeze, yet to become.
Really maybe I am ready for autumn because I long for winter. Because autumn teaches us that things die away by no choice of our own and we must simply exist in the season. That then the next season will be harder, less poignant, and a little more to the bone.
But I think there comes a spring – well maybe some part of me knows, and is craving autumn days.
