The ladybugs are swarming, spraying over the walls like a cascade of
red BBs fired into the sun-warmed brick. You're supposed to get a wish
if they land on you; if so my bank of wishes is now fully credited.
What shall I spend them on? Right now, replete with the colors of
fall, I feel no need to do so. Perhaps I shall pile them up in the
bole of a tree, to draw on in the dark hours of winter.
The crisp chilliness of the last weeks has given way to a lazy
warmth, but there's an edge to it. It's clear that it is but a pause
before the plunge, the swooping down into winter that the shedding
trees ride, naked arms raised to the sky.
I've been
running in the mornings before class, and I feel the seasons shifting
around me. My feet crackle through drying leaves and skirt soft mud;
my nose takes in the smell of decaying vegetation with the air. It's a
curious dusty rot, smelling of stale herbs from the back of the spice
drawer, and not the dank mouldering of spring or late summer. I feel
the sun on the tops of my feet, on my shoulders, beaming onto my hair -
while the chill breeze makes my nose run and my ears burn. Squirrels
are running too, browning walnuts clutched in their jaws, tails
fluffing up in anticipation of snow.
On the VFF forums there is
much preoccupation with the looming promise of cold wet feet for those
who wish to run outdoors, out in the world. I am hoping that I am able
to take in that experience and learn to enjoy it; would not I
understand snow more when it seeps into the edges of me, caresses my
toes, depresses beneath my soles, while I run, puffing out visible air
and blinking flakes from my lashes?
Or perhaps I will turn
myself into a hamster on a wheel, pounding on the unvarying surface of
the treadmill while my feet long for the caress of gravel and tree
roots. Deadened with music in my ears, thumping bodies on either side
of me, I will turn inward, a tree drawing in its sap to prepare for
spring, a beetle crawling into a crack to wait out the white world of
cold.
I breathe in the world, and the world surrounds me,
lifting my feet; I pat the earth with every stride, and the earth
strokes the soles of my feet in return. It is work, but life is work,
and I feel alive, swirling in the leaves of fall, a bright figure dashing through the air to return to my warm brick home.
Fly, ladybirds, fly.
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