Dear October,
Today you were a
perfect, blustery fall day. Your morning matched my mood as I frantically ran
around campus trying to find a printer that would print my essay for Lit class.
As I walked the leaves tumbled down around me and danced through the air so
fast I had to squint for fear the wind would blow something into my eyes. The
trees on campus are changing noticeably now, their tops crowned by lots of yellow
and a little bit of red. Today feels like a poem I’m not sure I can write, but
I’m going to try anyway.
Later tonight I get to carve pumpkins, an event that the
Student Activities Committee is putting on. It’s been years since I’ve carved a
pumpkin, so I got excited as soon as I heard about it. Pumpkin carving always
makes me think of Martha Stewart, and Martha Stewart Living is still my guilty
pleasure magazine, especially the Halloween edition. I fall every single time
for the beautiful pictures of old new England cottages with paper silhouettes
of witches in the windows, and of cupcakes decorated to look like spiders, and
of black and white streamers twisting above the fireplace like decorations for
some monochromatic prom. The places in that magazine, the cottage, the spotless
living room, the rustic front porch with the perfectly carved pumpkins on the
stairs, always seemed magical to me, like they were the true embodiment of all
things Fall. But I know that isn’t true. Fall is in days like today- just
chilly enough to warrant a sweater (even though most people didn’t bother),
with the wind at your back and leaves spinning around your head. Today the
leaves, huge and brittle, crunched under my feet as I walked to class. The
pumpkin I carve tonight won’t be a work of art like the ones in Martha Stewart
Living, and I don’t even have a rustic front porch to display it on. But that’s okay, because instead I’ll be back
in the cafeteria, surrounded by friends who are hopefully just as inexperienced
at pumpkin carving as I am, and it will be the act, the messiness of it all,
that counts, and not the idea, this perfectly imagined picture of a season that
we get from the glossy pages of magazines. I prefer days like today over that,
anyway.
Laura
Song of the day: "Little Green" by Joni Mitchell
No comments:
Post a Comment