Autumnal Awakening

 If you have never read Kate Chopin, let me highlight a little about her and her book "The Awakening".  Chopin wrote feminist literature in a time where all that was required of women was to be feminine and play their part.  Chopin couldn't play her part as her husband died and left her penniless so she wrote and she wrote about what interested her and what interested her was women living a life bigger than they were currently allowed to. In "The Story of an Hour" the main character dies of a heart attack upon learning that the husband she thought was dead was really alive.  Boom, dead.  That is a fun story to read with 16 year old students.  In "The Awakening", her main character has an affair with a younger man (scandal!) and then commits suicide by walking into the lake with her heavy dress' pockets filled with heavy stones.  No weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth like Flaubert's whiny Madame Bovary.  Just a straight walk into a cold lake with heavy pockets and a heavier purpose.  In between the affair and the death part, the character experiences her awakening.  Her sense of purpose in the world and what it meant to be a woman in her time and place.  I find that as I live up north for the first time in decades, I too am having some kind of awakening here.

Younger man?  My person is a younger man! (highly recommend).  Suicide in the sea? No, thanks.  If I am not 98 and wizened and holding a sharper tongue that I do now, I don't want to know. Three hairs left on my head and four on my chin sounds about right.  (I imagine my person reading this right now and sighing.) No, my awakening is coming with the splendor of autumn all around me.  

The splendor!

Texas does spring really well but there's nothing to say about fall down there.  Hot until November, sweaty til December, two brown leaves fall down, and it's over.  The visual cornucopia of reds, and oranges, and yellows of autumn in IL just batters my eyes until I want to weep for the stunning beauty of it all.  It is afire!  It is resplendent!  It is glorious to behold and I am beholding it! I am driving to work and want to beep my horn for the joy of the tree-lined streets of yellows and orange and red. I do not because we only beep our horn up here for impatience or anger, not joy.  I want to stop and take a picture of every tree I am finding beautiful, but that is every tree!  The prairie grasses also change color!!!  Who knew?!?!? 

This little guy tried to turn every color!

It's not just the visual either.  It is the pleasure of kicking through leaves and hearing them skitter ahead of you on the sidewalk.  The crunch as you step through them.  The sweet smell of decaying leaves and grass and somehow a little apple released and swept into a nose used to dusty grass and ragweed.  The crisp taste of apple cider that matches the crisp feel in the air.  The air that feels clean and bright and crisp all at once.  Where a soft layer is all you need and all you want.  You want to feel that fresh fall air fall over you.  Autumn is assaulting all of my senses and I am awake!

I know.  I know all this autumnal beauty is the precursor to winter. I remember. I know that both the sky and earth will be grey and muted and dead. I know the sun will barely rise before it sets and I will hibernate in the house and eat all the carbs and feel pale, and lumpy, and misshapen.  I might wear the same hoodie for days and feel that scurvy and rickets are only a day away if the sun doesn't come out again soon. I know that the air will be biting and brutal.  I know the snow will  a pain to clean off of a car and scary to drive in. I know and yeah, I know.  None of that matters because after 30 dormant years of no fall at all, I am having an autumnal awakening of epic proportions.  I am so excited about this autumn that I would hang up one of those "Happy Fall Y'all" signs and mean it.  If my kids were here, I would drag them into the woods in matching flannels to have a picture taken.  But only after we picked apples and sang some kind of autumn song and sipped cider and carved a pumpkin and had a leaf fight and smiled. (I am picturing my kids reading this and thinking how glad to not be here right now.)

If you are in a place that does autumn like this, get out there and have your own awakening!  Smell it, see it, feel it, taste it! It is too good to not carve some time out to revel in it.  Let it wash over you until you are smiling at leaves and grinning into the wind.  If you live in a place that is still flesh-eating hot, I am sorry.  I am trying to send you some of my autumn through my words.  If it isn't working, come and visit me next autumn instead!  We will crunch through leaves and eat apples and wear flannel and behold all that is autumn and feel really, really happy inside.  Oh, we will also smile while singing at autumn song, so come prepared.

Side note: I have no idea what an autumn song is, so come really prepared.

Sigh.