I hope this isn't too flowery. A memory of autumn, from childhood... * * * When I was a child, we moved to a far-north town near Chicago: It was on the edge of the world, it seemed; it still had open prairie fields, lots of dark forests, ravines, and moraines; and it was vast and primeval. If you've never seen the northern midwest, it's a huge, leafy, teeming place. Not the endless expanse of cornfields and wheatfields which so many people associate with it: Where I grew up, it was an opulent treasure chest of a place. The rare gift of autumn is that it's cold, but lush. Cold but opulent: It was the combination that made it so special: You didn't expect cold to be lush: You expected it to be bleak and desolate. But in autumn, it blazed. The colors blazed. The trees wore diadems. And the fragrance---from leaves on the ground and the sweetness of the earth as it heaved its last moist breath before winter set-in---was from heaven. As if someone came down and graced us with perfumes and lightshows: Nature put on a last spectacular show before it went into hibernation... You have to know: The upper midwest, in those days---ie, before global warming---was cold 8 months out of the year. Summer was a 'break', not the norm. Once September was over, the temperatures dropped to near-freezing at night, and they stayed that way until May. Yet, the canopies of those lush and beauteous trees were like big, hugging arms watching over you, protecting you. And the rustle beneath your feet---from leaves, stems, acorns---was music. The streets in those old shaggy neighborhoods twisted and turned, and gave all kinds of mystery-vistas, hidden coves and alleyways. When you walked through people's yards---to get to school---you'd pass pear trees, apple trees, grape vines, all of it. We had them in our backyard. In autumn, the fruit rotted and fell, creating colorful 'rainfalls' of decay. They smelled sweet; and they added to the cornucopia that blanketed the earth for weeks. And burning leaves---then common---saturated the air with a pungent, sweet-stinging fragrance; the perfumes of autumn were everywhere. As fall waned, the ground became a carpet of leaves, and the light changed forever. November light was silver; cool and sterling silver. It was mournful and beautiful. The trees were bare by mid November; and, instead of seeing lush 'hairdos' in the trees, you now saw the bony remnants, the skeletons of nature; and you felt nature was exposing its foundations, spare, naked and harsh. The branches were now like the bony hands of ancestors, rustling along the skies, grasping for something long-gone. We thought they were telling secrets. And the carpet of leaves were now plush. Everything transferred to the earth, soon to be reclaimed as winter slowly crept in. And the ravines were little canyons carved out by the last ice age. Little finger-grooves. They only descended about 30 feet, but they were majestic and intimate, as they tunneled alongside homes with their bony streams and unique ecologies (with animals, insects and plants that only lived in those spaces). When you crawled down inside them, you landed in this deep echo chamber, surrounded by bony brush (which you invariably cut yourself on, as you crawled through its mazes to get to the bottom). And you lay there in silence, untouched by the world...You could see the smoke curling out of chimneys, up above; but in the ravine, the air was thick, like a quilt; and you felt immensely protected. As the night came, it unearthed the music of these tiny kingdoms: Creaking, rustlings, snapping of branches, the crunchy sounds of animals scuttling their way through the rubble to find food or shelter. And the deep impenetrable thickness of silence. A few weeks later, the streams would become mausoleums---with leaves and branches, even animals, frozen to death in the now-solid ice that covered them. A museum display under glass...And, every so often, you'd hear the creak of ice breaking downstream, a little water still running: It too would freeze very soon... One night, I got lost, and landed in one of those untouched prairie fields: With grasses higher than humans, and so thick you couldn't get through them without a knife, it was impenetrable. I thought: I'm lost. I'll never get home. But in this late fall cold, it crackled in the wind---the glorious ancient grasses doing their private cantatas, filling the air with starched and desiccated bamboo-like cracklings, as the frigid winds settled in for the night. I stumbled and groped, cutting myself several times, until I came out the other side---feeling sad that this grass would soon be gone. A last patch of what was once a vast expanse of the mightiest, most primal grasses in the world. I walked home. Fall would soon be over, the shows would soon be over. But they were some of the sweetest memories of my life. Some memories of autumn, from my childhood... * * *