After The Rush

Fall.

Fall is about transition

Fall is the glorious intersection between long bladed high tasseled orchard grass and bitter-cold blizzards. Fall is transition, from summer to winter, from leaves to bare limbs in the wind, from green and green to brown and white. From the first morning you walk out and your nose prickles at the clean crisp scent of frost to the evening that the geese finally wail their last song and take flight, like a swirling vortex of feather, to begin south. By the last lonesome call of the cricket you can tell that fall is upon us, by the intricate ice crystals on the grass in the early morning before the sun is upon it you can tell that fall is upon us. Fall is a transition; it is impossible to know exactly when, but the squirrels can feel it, and fill their holes with food, and the deer can feel it and start to bed down in the shelter of the softwoods, and the trout fear it and frantically dart towards the larger pools and falls, and the people feel it and travel for hundreds of miles from their homes to see the woods blaze in burning ferocity. 

In time, the commotion is forgotten. The rest of fall is left behind with the receding tide of excitement. When the leaves finally settle to the ground, and the ceaseless wind tires with its games, the quiet of the stick season falls upon the woods, I am caught in transition once again. Alone with the woods and fields, the calm of autumn is deafening, and I am once again thrown into remembering the joys of summer, and anticipating the beauty of winter alone in the bare branches.