rivendellrose | Autumn thoughts

The wheel has been turning. These last few days I've begun to see the signs that my favorite season--autumn--is at last upon us. The trees here in the city are beginning to turn gold or brown and fall, making crinkly carpets of the paths and sidewalks. Acorns have been turning up all over for probably a month now, but today I found my first few chestnuts of the season. Shiny-bright, red-brown, and so smooth and slippery in my hand that I want to just carry them around and rub them for hours.

I've not been sure of the exact date of the equinox this year (I think it might actually be tomorrow), but I've decided to celebrate today, since I don't have work, and since the weather is so lovely. It doesn't make a huge difference, really--I don't do much for the holidays, these days, but I have special prayers, and I bought a candle to light tonight, assuming I can find something to put it in/on. I'll probably end up using one of my plates, and then just hoping the wax comes off properly. It's a little thing, but I'd be sad if I spent the whole summer being *able* to light a candle but not doing it. I've also got the leftovers of the red-wine, so I'll have a real little celebration for the first time in quite a while.

Even though it's my favorite time of year, seeing all the trees lose their leaves does make me sad--I miss the bright colors and the sounds the wind makes when it blows through them, and the trees look so bare and stark without them. Also, the leaves are my main way of figuring out what each tree is. I don't know many, but it makes me happy to recognize chestnut, oak, alder, maple, and even the ones I don't know by name, but just by shape and color. I should make more of an effort to identify these trees--it's so comforting to know them, to connect them with stories and ideas in my mind.

For whatever reason, trees have always had a special place in my heart. I distinctly recall crying for the old evergreen Christmas tree that had to be thrown out when I couldn't have been older than four years old, and I'd rather not talk about the endless fights I had with my dad over the fate of the little vine maples whose branches thwapped him in the face every time he tried to go out to our compost heap in the backyard. They were the perfect height for me to slip under the branches, of course... and I probably wouldn't have cared even if they weren't. I refuse to visit our old house, from which we moved just last summer, because I'm afraid to think what the new owners have done to my maple trees, my asian pear trees, and the kiwi bush that grew outside my window.

A friend in highschool used to say that I was a tree-nymph, a dryad, in a previous life. I don't think much about reincarnation, myself, but I think this is decently accurate as an appraisal of, if nothing else, my attachment to forests and trees. I know the time of year by them, watching their buds and leaves and fruit, and have found quiet friendship in them more times than I can count, leaning against a sturdy trunk with a canopy of leaves above my head.

Tonight, I'll light a candle, whisper prayers, and drink a toast of rich red wine to the year that comes to a close, and to the trees that mark that passing with festival colors and harvest fruits.