Asklemmy

When the heat finally splits open, and that cool draft swirls through, and I feel fall in the air I’m full of desire to seek comfort.

So many summers ending with new adventures. Each new school year was terrifying, but there was a certain point, about when the weather would start getting cool, when I’d realize the school year was well under way and I was surviving it.

College was like this. Finally unpacked the stuff from the car, said my tearful goodbyes to Mom, and watched with relief as her car disappeared down the road. Then it was just me, alone, on my own. And school starting up. A whole world to learn and master: groceries, homework, any bedtime I wanted, drugs, girls, advanced calculus, lecture halls echoing with more knowledge than I could ever absorb.

Even though Stairway to Heaven mentions June, it is a fall song. Spotify, in all its recommendation engine wisdom, plays it for me only in these first few crisp days of autumn. It knows.

Through its petabytes of statistical inferences, it has teased out the archetypal truth:

As we wind on down the road, our shadow’s taller than our soul. There walks a lady we all know, who shines white light, and wants to show that everything still turns to gold. And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last.

Fall is a time to meditate and sink into memory, to be grateful for the pages already written, and by yearning to be back in the fresh and unwritten ink of those past chapters as they were happening, to develop an appreciation and hunger for our present, which will someday also be buried in the ice of time, but which is just now soft and warm and responsive to our touch.