Autumn
Autumn is my favorite time of year — not that we get much of one around Atlanta, but it’s the thought that counts, I suppose. I love the fact that the weather actually becomes tolerable, and even borders on crisp, at least in the mornings and evenings. I like the shortening days: as dusk begins earlier and earlier, I start to feel as if I’m a social gadabout, or at least someone with something others would recognize as a life, because I’m actually getting home after sunset. You can finally wear light jackets or long sleeves (though usually not both at the same time, not until November or December) without feeling as if you’re being roasted alive. It’s time to go shopping for school supplies, or at least look at them longingly and wish that you had a reason to buy notebook paper and pens and mechanical pencils and those organizer-calendar-address book things that always look so geekily cool but always turn out to be way more trouble to keep updated than they’re ever worth. The squirrels start chittering angrily at you as you walk your dog, and try to drive you away by pelting you with acorns. In some parts of the country, you even get the pleasure of watching the leaves turn, and then spending the next couple of weeks shuffling through knee-deep piles of them once they fall off the trees. I really miss that.
We don’t get much of a leaf change here, or so it seems. Not in the city, at least. We have trees, but it feels as if the leaves are green one day, then suddenly all brown, and then they’re gone — not even in piles, just blown away somewhere. No leaf shuffling for me.
I did find out where some of the leaves go, or at least part of one of them. I got home this evening to discover that, for what might possibly have been a good portion of the entire day, I’d been walking around with a chunk of reddish-brown leaf stuck in the tangles of my hair. Why did no one tell me?
