Excerpt from my runner’s diary: August 25, 2010 – Good run. Felt strong at the end. A leaf hit me on the way home.
I like to try and find the FIRST hint of a new season. I have often said that autumn in Chicago is the most predictable of all seasons found here. So, it is no surprise to see at least one tree on every residential block setting down a timely layer of brown, red, yellow and orange foliage. The wind moves these leaves in directions that seem to awaken neighboring trees like a chain reaction. Soon the trees would be bare and the streets & sidewalks covered in autumn color.
I think I noticed autumn’s first touch this year, two weeks ago in the late days of August. I don’t know if it was my imagination or not, but I felt something. I began to look for clues, autumn clues… awakening all of my senses to it. And I was running, running through the streets where I live, in Arlington Heights. I could have been blindfolded because I have ran that 3 mile path so many times. Not taking notice to much around me and deep in thought, like a runner can sometimes get, I may have been on the very edge of some personal insight, when all of sudden a “cool autumn” breeze blew across my face and a leaf the size of my hand hit my chest and stuck. Without delay, I snatched it up, stopped running and looked at it. It was symmetrically perfect and aged with the sunny times of a long Summer soon to pass. Though it had accomplished and completed its life’s purpose, in its final moments it fulfilled perhaps the most amazing of miracles. It gave me a smile.
I wonder, when I’m gone, how many smiles will I inspire? I would like to think, just enough to change a life, one life, a little… I love Autumn…
“My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.” –Robert Frost, American poet
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