AUTUMNAL

It's coming. It's not obvious right away, but it's happening. You have to be vigilant to notice it. It's subtle. Sneaky. Ninja like. But as John Wayne said in The Searchers "Son, you got to learn to read the signs"

Some signs are obvious. This morning I went around the house flipping all the calendars to October. Mostly a delightful experience. The adult border collie calendar in the living room, the puppy calendar in the bedroom. The adult is a brown and white border, the puppy a tri colour, both different from our two black and whites. But collies nonetheless. You have to smile, just looking at them.

In the hallway I flipped to the new month and picture in the Tom Thompson calendar. An oil painting of a northern river, cold and blue and about to be iced over. Beautiful.

In my office, a rather bittersweet experience, as I change the month/picture on my When Darkness Falls fantasy women calendar. Miss October is some kind of autumn wood nymph with purple fairy wings and a stripper's outfit (yeh it's that kind of calendar) She is lovely, but Miss September and I were, I think, just beginning to connect. Ah well.

Other signs. The weather is changing. Walking the girls I've gone from shorts and tank tops to jeans and sweaters. Still, this morning was sunny with very little wind and there was warmth on my face. The evening walks are different of course; as the sun sets you can feel that coldness, that turn of the air you don't feel in any other season. Fall. It's sneaking in.

Autumnal. I love that word.

There are leaves down in my backyard but you can't really see the leaves changing here in the city, our neighbourhood has too many pine trees. If I drove west and south into the Niagra valley I'm sure I'd see it, as the orchards and farm trees become set ablaze. We're going up to the Georgian Bay for Thanksgiving and I know we'll see that full riot of colour, much as in the Tom Thompson print.

This weekend is Nuit Blanche, a Toronto autumn tradition. Which means art installations to see and cold pellets of rain to dodge.

When is Fall? September seems too early. In the last few years Sept has been our last gasp of summer. Sun, temps in the high 20's. It's only begun to get cool in the last few days. November seems too late for Fall. It will be cold then. In years past I wouldn't have expected to see snow in Nov in southern Ontario but these days, that is more than possible. November is winter, no matter what you tell me.

For me, October is Fall. Thanksgiving. The harvest. Halloween, when you feel that cold wind skirling around your ankles as the kids scurry about in their costumes. That special wind. Not of summer, not of winter, but something all to itself. Cool, but with the dying summer still faintly warm on its back and redolent of dead leaves and black earth, once powerful and rich, not getting ready to rest.

Autumnal.

I get nostalgic during this season. I always think of Kingston, it's such a perfect autumn town. The grey limestone buildings and the cold lake battering against the breakwater and the leaves falling down in the parks, skirling around you as you hug the collar of your jacket around your neck; the leaves falling like sparks falling downward, the colour hot and vibrant but the leaf cold as they touch your face.

I think back even further, to the fall I experienced in Thompson, Manitoba. Land of permafrost. Jack pines and birch trees. In the morning, standing by little Moak Lake, looking across its placid surface, wraithed in mist, to the endless miles of wooded hills, the deep placid green of the pines occasionally disrupted by the boisterous yellow of the birch trees as they waited to shed.

Or of Collette's home up on the Georgian Bay, a wide variety of trees, greens and yellows and reds, smeared through the vallies like an oil painting gone amok. The big lake becoming dark and still and silent, filled with cold and power and secrets.

Autumnal

I moan about our lack of real summer but I do love this time of year. Cool and clean, the parks emptier, but still not winter, you can still smell grass, the scent of the leaves. Me and my dogs and my lady walking the trails, small puddles gleaming like dark glass. The sky its own colour, the colour of fall, of harvest, of autumn.

It's coming. Close your eyes.

It's here.