Autumn

It was always my favorite season.

I love everything about it. The way it looks. The way it smells. The way it feels. Autumn is a season that is considerate to your senses. It's the only season that seems to adore me, appealing to my tastes flawlessly. Suiting my fancies.

Perfect weather. Football season. Marching band season, the good parts and the bad. Changing leaves, falling leaves, naked tree branches--perfect excuses to take photographs of anything and everything. Halloween. Candy corn and mini Twix bars. Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie.

Autumn is one of those occurrences that teaches you to love the simple things in life. Watching leaves fall around you. The feeling of warm air pushing against your face as your bicycle races through the clear air. Sitting around your kitchen table with your family on Thanksgiving. The sheer happiness you can't contain when your school's team wins at a football game. The little burst of pride when you take the perfect photograph of yellow leaves scattered on the front lawn or bare trees reflected in the still river. Autumn humbles you. The world stops revolving around you. You start revolving around the world.

And then all the leaves dry up, everything turns brown, the air becomes shallow and cold, and so do you.

Autumn was long this year, and it never quite screeched to a halt. It just disintegrated, so slowly that I barely even noticed. The occasional balmy day would come along after a few days of cold or rain. It was an unpredictable visitor that seemed to live for the surprised smiles on our faces as we walked outside and found ourselves bathed in warm sunlight, stripping off our warm weather hats and knitted scarves and exchanging our layers for a single sweatshirt. Even that was too much sometimes, but we had to keep that little bit of warmth, because we were uncertain of how long our good luck would last.

Is it possible to simply enjoy your good luck? Is it possible not to question it?