First of all, a little note -- Angelfire's email seems to be on the fritz, so if you've emailed me at belong@angelfire.com in the past three days, and I haven't replied, don't think I haven't replied because I don't like you. Please just resend your mail, if you can, to jupiterrrr@hotmail.com. (That's four "r's") Hotmail may be an ass pain, but I've had that stupid account for like, four years, and it's not let me down yet... Sorry, guys...
I've never been a big fan of autumn. As soon as the leaves start changing colors, I get bummed out. Everything after Labor Day -- the first Monday of September -- is just sort of depressing. It's cold, it's windy, and even though I live in one of the best areas of the world to look at zillions of trees turning zillions of different colors, I've never really been impressed.
(Ignorantly, I suppose, I used to think leaves changed color everywhere. But when I was in Santa Fe, everybody made a HUGE deal about the aspens changing color... Aspens, as a matter of fact, DO change color, but all they do is turn yellow, so you get one big yellow mountain in the middle of a scrubby little pine forest. Talk about unimpressive. Even stranger than that, Mike FREAKED about the yellow trees and kept insisting they all had a disease. He stopped short of trying to revive an aspen via CPR when I told him what happens to trees in upstate New York, how they ALL turn yellow and red and orange. I think he thought I was kidding, and that the photos I showed him were touched up... Poor, poor southwesterners with their poor pathetic yellow aspens...)
I've never cared for fall. Fall is time to go back to school, break up with whatever great summer love you've had, and sit in a classroom ignoring lessons about Franklin Roosevelt and square roots. I believe I will be 87 years old and STILL waking up at the crack of dawn a few times every autmun thinking desperately, "SHIT, I missed the damn school bus." THAT is depressing. How people can ENJOY autumn is beyond me...
I wasn't thrilled with this past fall, either. It was a little windy, a little too cold to be without a jacket, and just simply miserable.
Until one day, the last Saturday of October, Norman and I decided to go to the Clinton Street Fair. Now, the Clinton Street Fair, which is not actually on Clinton Street, is a little ghetto fair with lemonades and hot dogs and three or four amusement rides, all of which are creaky.
Naturally, of course, we HAD to go on the rides. You can't go to a fair without going on the rides. Even if parts of the machinery are falling off, you HAVE to go on the rides. We chose one; this big circular piece of metal junk that spun you up in the air; a sort of diagonal ferris wheel.
("Baby, ferris wheels are slower..." "Yeah, yeah...")
So we boarded the ferris wheel thing, accompanied by only one other rider, and I made Norman promise to kiss me at the top. He fondled me teasingly and promised.
And so, at the top, Norman kissed me. And at the bottom, Norman kissed me, and then back at the top again, I kissed him on the neck, and looked out over the whole world. The sky was brilliantly, blindingly blue, which absolutely NEVER happens in Binghamton. The sky in Binghamton is usually sort of bluish in the same way that the carpet in my apartment building used to be green, but you'd never guess it. It TRIES to be blue, but sunny days in Binghamton are usually pale grey or white. This was a Binghamton sky that belonged in a freak show: a mutant, almost laughable. So I did laugh.
It was peak "leaf-peeping" time. (Note: you may not use the phrase "leaf-peeping" unless you're well over fifty or you work for the newspaper; leaf-peeping is something you do after you get out of church on Sunday and have extra fiber for Sunday brunch...) I don't know what kinds of trees are native to Clinton Street and surrounding areas, but every one of them must have been something different, and they really did look like a touched-up photograph. They looked like a calendar.
Everything was sort of quiet; there was a little bit of traffic somewhere, and a bunch of kids below us screaming their bloody heads off, and Norman and I babbling at each other, but everything else was silent. It wasn't a silence you could sense with your ears, but you could SEE it, sort of, and maybe touched it if you knew where to reach.
Norman's eyes, like the mutant sky, were a very strange color. We hadn't been together long, but long enough so that I concretely knew his eyes were hazel. That day, they were bright green, the sort of green you only see in pictures of dark jungles and strange movies. Kissing somebody with eyes that color was like dipping cold feet into warm chocolate pudding and wiggling your toes around. I bet Seattle is mostly that green color.
I tried to kick at a yellow tree as it whirled away under my feet. I missed.
"Wanna go again?"
"Yeah."
So we went again. I didn't kiss Norman at the top every time this time. I was too busy wondering how, all of a sudden, autumn was sort of pretty, and the sky had turned blue. I snuggled up against Norman and watched everything rush by me.
We left the Clinton Street Fair, which is not on Clinton Street, and I walked Norman downtown, to Lost Dog Café. Before we got there, one of us had the brilliant idea to scale a building -- a big red abandonned one -- and make love overlooking the river and the trees and that insane sky.
I decided that day I liked autumn.
It's the freaking middle of February now, and I think I'd give anything to see a tree with leaves on it -- any leaves, of any color. Winter is boring and cold and I keep feeling like I'm in a trap. If anybody can give me a good reason to like winter, I'm ALL ears.
Love,
~Helena*