Autumn, Now

It's beginning to feel like fall outside.

While sitting with a book in the yard, I saw an intrepid (and chubby) squirrel industriously burying acorns today. It looked at me challengingly with its beady little eyes, as if daring me to stand up and watch it scamper deftly away, onwards to the next acorn cache. Ever the pacifist, I just sat, letting my open book fall into my lap, enjoying the midday sun and the sibilant whisper of wind amidst the oak leaves.

Moments like this remind me poignantly of home, how I could track the procession from summer into autumn from my bedroom window, the trees in my back yard growing riotous with color and then all at once barren. My memories correlate with the season. Autumn is always school and friends, the onerous coursework, cross country meets every Saturday, the mismatched layers of nubby knits mom would pile on before work each day. These are the images flitting about my head in these pre-autumnal days. Looking forward, it's strange and not a little bit disconcerting to think that that life, that distilled essence of Tennessee in fall, is lost to me now (for the next four years at least). My autumns will now be exclusively spent here, in Cambridge, sitting by imperious squirrels in Harvard yard, running in the rain to Lamont, eating Americanized Chinese food and pushing through milling crowds of tourists who don't know my name but figure I'm a Harvard student.

As we discussed in class, in reference to A Mountain of Crumbs, it's hard--to leave home that is. I look out my new bedroom window and see the redbrick of Strauss dorm and Mass Ave beyond it instead of four stately elms and my mother's vegetable patch.

What happens now I wonder? When will my recollections of Harvard blend into that lovely quagmire in my memory I flavor with lethal doses of nostalgia? Or will the two realms: Tennessee and Cambridge, forever stand alone in my consciousness, two surprisingly distinct phases in my cluttered life.

 Regardless, I say hello and good day to you autumn , my friend. To quote my favorite Keats poem, you have always been a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."