the squirrel highway and autumn.

I stood in Griffith Woods as a storm was blowing in from the mountains. The living trees shook and the dead ones crackled as squirrels hurried across the broken down log, their own highway of sorts. I thought about the imagery of a tree being knocked from its roots and falling down in front of me. I shuttered at the way a tree stands so tall, then quite suddenly, something like the weather roars and rattles, swallowing whole what once stood so tall and it made me begin to wonder about the very strangeness that is my own life.

These woods. This wind. The cutting down of our snapdragon crop. Never knowing if it is too early or too late to pull the flowers from the ground and making dried bouquets. I take what is left of the tomatoes and watch them ripen on the kitchen windowsill. Dreaming, always dreaming of berries cooked in pies and the way sunlight bends through these spaces we have come to know as ours.

These days, all I think about, truthfully, is food. It seems that once the leaves no longer sit beneath a summer, I start thinking of ways to make that feeling last — the one that welcomes bare legged you into the garden and keeps one leg out from the covers where you sleep. A warm meal as the weather turns is something treasured. I am reminded of my younger days, when I played basketball and it was all I did, practice in the morning, practice at night, when the team wasn't practicing, I was bouncing around on the pavement outside of my house with a ball in hand and a net. The air would be chilled to the touch, leaves scattered, cheeks rosy, hands bruised, and I would come inside as the dusk settled to a warm meal made by my mum.

It was this that made even the roughest sewn dreams feel like an illusion and the cold hands from working outside were made to be held by a spoon and a fork. I would gently savor each bite — something my mum always taught me to do. As my brother, my dad or whoever was visiting at the time ate hurriedly, licking their plates clean like cats do, I was only on my second spoonful. 

We all have our own reasons to believe in one as our season, the season that rises good thoughts above all the rest. Some don't even care about the seasons in this way, except for maybe which tires to put on the car or what coat to wear, but I am attached in my own strangeness to each one. Summer, it is freedom. Freedom of thought, freedom of cloth, freedom to walk without shoes and grow flowers out of the dirt. Autumn, it is an eventual sadness for me, as I am stuck in the routine of thinking about what I didn't do during July or August, as if there was more for me and how I never swam enough. I will never swim enough. What am I to do without the sun to kiss me in the morning? 

Perhaps, I will eat warm meals and play the banjo.

What season is your favorite?

 outfit details: winners blouse and boots, wild country vintage skirt

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