Fall is falling

Fall is coming, I can feel it. All lovers of fall, like myself, seem to share in overwhelming sensory fall memories at the slightest scent of cool in the air. A million things all bundled up in a half second blip.

For some reason, the fall I am reminded of today, is moving, at 20 years old to St. John's. My first time away from my parents home. I had gone on the back of a motorcyle of a relative stranger who went on to become my boyfriend for 9 years. Together with him and an old friend, fresh after a year of recovering from a mental meltdown, feeling the best I ever had, I arrived by ferry on a crisp, late september evening with the low, orange sun carving the rocks of the island into monuments.

I went with only a knapsack full of things: some clothes, and some art supplies. The most free of possessions and worry I've ever been. I waltzed myself into a pleasant job at a bookstore, a live-in boyfriend and a subdued calm. Waking everyday with the smell of the atlantic coming through the bedroom window, falling asleep each night to the sound of foghorns, buying fresh bread and peanut butter cookies daily from the bakery down the street on the way to work, watching the ships dock at the harbour...

My strongest defining memory is sitting at home, in my first apartment in the late afternoon, alone in the huge, decrepit living room with only an old couch and a stereo and one cd to our name(The Cranberries would you believe. It wasn't even mine.). We had big bay windows on street level and the sun was beaming onto the wooden floor hitting one of my feet, warming and outlining it while the other was cool in the shadows. The dust was dancing in the beam and the voices of kids coming home from school drifted in.

The cd came to an end and I sat there, just watching the sun beam play on the floor, listening to the kids, feeling the outside air cool the room as the sun moved beyond the window down behind the houses. I felt the happiness of the naive. I was alone in my first place and the sun was gentle and the air was brisk and the ocean was near. It was fall. The calm season, the quiet season. After the brilliant buzz of summer and before the sharp white of winter, fall falls, warm orange and deep red and dusky blue, wool sweaters and early sunsets blazing fire, crunching leaves and cold ground, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!

So the first hints of fall always immerse me in this dreamy state. Like diving under the wave and seeing all the bubbles and seaweed and fish, the world above the sea forgotten. The wave of fall has come and under I happily go.