I'm feeling a little squirrely tonight. Like, ancy. And, guilty. I have no specific reason for this feeling, but it's damn persistent all the same. Molly says the changing seasons make me anxious, like I'm an arthritic joint that flares up when those October rain clouds come tumbling in. I don't know about that. I think it's the pace of it all. August through December is my favorite time of the year. I know that's almost half the year so so what if I'm greedy? But, I love the hot, rainless time of August (except this year) and the dusty wilt that settles in your skin by the end of the month. The few rainstorms are bold and make the pavement smell like a proposal. Then it rolls into September and the leaves tilt toward amber and rattle in their husks when those ocean winds peel off the tides. The salmon start running, haggard and lonley, jolting and waiting and jerking towards their homes. October is cornstalks and pumpkins and walking through too many spider webs, always doing that body-slapping dance in case the owner was home when you intruded. It's candles and candy and pumpkin-flavored everything. It's 6:00 darkness and mud puddles and leaf piles and grey. But the grey is new and it still smells like clean wet pavement.

In all this, I probably lose myself. I become the possibility of what could be. The possibility of being able to craft the perfect autumn. It would be a fall of pumpkin beer, soups that I actually wanted as leftover, pubs, fresh straw in stalls, chicken eggs (damn lazy hens), dry leaf piles raked after a long day of indoor work, apple pie, pot pie, pumpkin pie, family dinners, ferry boat rides where I actually go up top, fleece jackets and wool hats, long phone calls when rain hammers the window, rubber boots to wade through the front yard, clean gutters, a wood stove. And, the weird thing is that this is what fall is. It happens all around me and I can't always see that it's here.