It ain't the same as walking, but...

Driving through town today, I saw that fall is really going to happen here.


Yesterday, as I walked home from the University Library (with Volume I of the 1980 BBC Version of Pride & Prejudice clutched in my hands (yee!)), I looked around. Carefully. Like I had something to see. And the world showed me beauty.

The old Wabash Train Depot, sitting abandoned just north of the Teak House (I know, there are Greek letters that designate the actual name of the fraternity, but I call it the Teak House). Boards nailed across windows, visible holes in the floor, old and new brick in narrow and wider windows become garage doors or bricked over remnants of something that used to be there, only differently. The platform is still present in the flattened earth out front of the building and the old tracks are now an 8 foot wide walk used by students and other wildlife. I am naturally terrified of everything, and although most of the time that can be avoided or even removed from the equation, I was not inclined to do much exploring without an accomplice a companion. There is an ineffective lock on one of the garage doors, and a missing board on one of the windows. Through the gap it is possible to see that there is still glass in some of the boarded up windows and there is still some woodwork and the ticket seller's window. What more is there, I do not know, but oh, what a lovely thing to think of restored, or better, re-purposed. I imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. But that is because I always imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. It is like a disease, more aptly described as a filter.

I saw a tree made of branches like impossibly jointed arms all dripping with yellow.

A squirrel and I had a silent conversation at a distance. The squirrel in the tree, me on the ground. Solemn and curious and each on our ways somewhere other.

There is a bird's nest in a lowish branch in the tree across the street. I noticed it because if you stand very still and watch very closely, and do not allow your mind to lie to your eyes, you will begin to see the leaves change color, from green to variegated yellow to fully yellow bunched around round and spiked seed pods that look like nothing so much as, well, spiky seed pods.

Driving is not a sport for leaf-watching, and it would not have been an issue had I not driven down Buchanan and seen the most beautiful tree in the county sitting innocent and glowing and brilliant and inviting right out front of the house that I adore.

The fall that I got my first divorce, I lived in an apartment in a house on a corner where four maples grew. Every leaf on those trees turned yellow, almost on the same day. They coated the yard and filled the tree, and became light bulbs on the gray rainy days of autumn in central Illinois. I would sit on the steps to the sidewalk for hours, just to stare at the dark brown bark of the tree and the golden impossible light of the leaves.

I have been waiting for this day for weeks: the day that I see that the world is changing and now I can explore its alterations and have something to see.

Also, I applied for a full-time job.
Fingers crossed.