Ok, so remember my post about fall yesterday?
Well, that was after the weekend wherein i had frost on my car after it sat for just 2 hours, Monday and Tuesday which were cold and rainy and miserable, and coming out into the cold night air Wednesday night after class. Today?

High: 82 degrees

Its supposed to set the highest recorded temperature in history for this date.
The mind boggles.

I love this time of year. The sun stays low in the sky all day, its light almost horizontal, illuminating the world in a very different way. It shoots through the translucent colored leaves casting a gold glow over everything. The leaves here are more brilliant than they ever were back home, but my dad says that this was the best year for changing leaves they've had in decades. They're turning brown in Pennsylvania already, I think we have a few more weeks of color here. He said that I was just a little boy the last time the trees were like this but I probably don't remember. I do. As an adult, I thought it was just my child's-eye view of the world, filtered through years of hazy memories, but I disinctly remember driving out into the country and seeing giant swaths of crimson and yellow covering the mountains. Every year since, I've been slightly disappointed that the color wasn't like I remembered. I assumed that leaves were never really like that, and that the dull bronze was normal, the bright reds and oranges were limited to the single rare tree. I like the trees here.

When I leave work at night, its already dark. In the summer I open my sunroof and windows, try to get as much fresh air infused into me as I can, play some silly happy music. Now, I pull the shade over my sunroof to keep out the streetlights, turn the heat up and put NPR on the radio. My little hatchback becomes a protective shell against the cold and the darkness. I sink into it, warm and dark.

Halloween ushers in this season. It lets the darkness in. We roll back the clocks and hide our faces behind masks and talk about the mysteries "out there" in the dark, imagining that ghosts and spirits are now coexisting with the living. For our Mexican friends, Day of the Dead gives them a time to reflect that someday, we'll all be with ancestors. I'm glad that its a holiday that slowly crossing the cultural barrier. Halloween isn't about evil for me, so much as it is about the unknown, about the darkness itself. Each day after Halloween gets just a bit darker than the one before, the sun setting just a few minutes earlier each day as we march toward the winter solstice.

Soon it will be Thanksgiving, a time to huddle with our families against the cold. Thanksgiving is like a glowing fire in a pitch black forest. We're going home to be with family and friends. I'm hoping its cold, I'm eager to smell that dry northeast air, tinged by woodsmoke again.

Pardon me, I think I hear a mug of hot chocolate calling my name.