October 9, 2013

Here's a recent journal entry that I wanted to share with you, written outside a coffee shop with lovely little leaves falling all around me. :)

October 9, 2013

I've always hated watching the summer die. It felt like a part of me-- a wonderful, exhilarating part-- was being stripped away, and nobody could promise me it would stay the same when it returned. What if the sun isn't quite as golden? What if the breezes are stickier, the flowers less potent, the grass a little dryer and the strawberries not as sweet? What if I sleep right through every firework show?

Summer always seems to be a better thing when I'm longing for its return. When June finally arrives on my doorstep, all wrapped up in shiny paper and daring me to dream, it never quite plays out exactly as I believed. I never end up running through the woods as often as I planned. We don't grill out every weekend as we ought. I end up doing my hair too nice and too often to roll my windows down for each and every drive. And though the beach is just an interstate away, time and gas prices make it more inviting to stay. In fact, by the time summer is over, I feel what I desire looks significantly like another summer. Those drawn-out heated-up days don't satisfy the way I want them to. 

When I was in college, I hated the fall the way one would hate their elementary school bully. My arch rival, it was. My greatest enemy, keeping me from all things beautiful and good. One September day stands out vividly in my mind. Racing down the stairs, slightly late to class as always, I opened the front door to greet another sweet Ohio morning, but instead felt an instant tearing on my skin. The breeze, cold, was clawing at my bare legs, demanding I go back inside and replace my skirt with something warmer. Fall had come. And it had killed my sweet shining summer swiftly overnight. The anger and sadness I felt clung to my chest like chainmail, defending this Yankee-Doodle-Dandy through the harshest of frosts, rusting all over once the snow began to fall, and breaking apart in the spring as the flowers broke up the ground. I walked through fall and winter blinded, not seeing or hearing but feeling only. Cold. Each day getting colder and colder. Crimson leaves on the ground were a reason to be bitter. Snow-covered driveways were burdens to be cursed. 

In the fall, everything died. In the winter, it was buried until the spring brought new life. And I, in my Miami sweatshirt, was very much one of the dying things. 

Salvation came in the form of a Southern job offer, a diamond ring connecting it to me, and a sweet new city with summers, oh summers! that are vibrant, fragrant, scalding hot... and forever long. Oh the elation! How much time we would share, sweet season. How many memories we had to make. 

But before the move came, I did something that would forever change my friendship with summer. I wore a white dress down the aisle of a church, we packed all we owned and took it down a Southern highway, we spent a week together roaming the beach and whispering late into the night. Settling into our apartment in our new home, I had so much love, so much joy and gratefulness surrounding my life that there was no room left for bitterness to cloud over my eyes. I went into that fall not blinded, but wide-eyed awake and alert.

There, in my newly-wedded bliss, ambling down the streets of a foreign city, finding "The World's Best Sweet Tea" in every restaurant we passed, I saw everything. I saw towering oak trees erupt suddenly into a bonfire of gold, littering the ground below with sunny yellow ashes. I saw a sea of burgundy lining the horizon, shifting in the wind like the tide coming in. I saw the endless blossom of the crepe myrtle, lining boulevards in an array of pink, white, pink. The breeze carried a different scent than its northern ally; it was no longer rotting, wet leaves but bonfires in backyards and smokey barbecue suppers. And the cool, crisp whisper of the breeze asked my hands to find another who would hold them, an arm that would wrap itself around my over-sized, knitted sweater, enticing us to stay close long into the night. The weekend after our honeymoon, I flew home to finish packing and say goodbye to my parents. In Ohio, the glamour of fall was already gone. One week. My wedding pictures show bright green trees almost blocking the view of the sky. One week, I returned, and the leaves were all on the ground, brown and broken, a few rough thunderstorms prematurely tearing down any type of show Autumn had hoped to display.

But here in the Carolinas, sweet tea in one hand and a man's palm in the other, Autumn laid itself out gradually over time. Each little colored leaf held onto the hue and the branch for weeks. September came and went. October as well. And by the end of November the fall began to sweetly dispel. Inch by inch and piece by piece, discarded confetti blanketed the ground, the naked trees declared finally that winter could start its rounds. And one young newlywed, in the midst of it all, wondered how she had ever ascribed ugliness to summer's dying in the kaleidoscope of fall.