Leaves change, and with them my perspective.

09.14.06 - 5.10 p.m.

I've been looking forward to this day all week. The day the rain began. It feels as though autumn is finally here, and I'm elated. I've been eager like a five year-old on Christmas Eve. This is - without doubt - my favorite time of year. The time when my love for this city, this place, abounds.

Despite the age-old adage that spring is a time of anticipation, of new beginnings...for me, it is not so. Autumn is my spring. A period that refreshes. It feels as though everything begins anew. A time when the cat gets the tongue of the cynic in me.

This morning, I opened the window in the living room which looks out into the backyard, and to a wall of sprawling trees and shrubs beyond it. The rain had stopped falling, at least temporarily, but the sky was still dolphin gray and plump with clouds; the air was so fiercely crisp I felt I could bite into it like a Granny Smith. I put my nose to the screen, closed my eyes, and drank it in. The honesty. The scent of the air after rain, particularly the first of the season, is one I wish I could bottle and dip into whenever my soul needed cleansing. It's that good.

I feel romantic. Perfectly imperfect. Hopeful. Alive. I am always pleasantly surprised that a change in the weather, a gentle shift of season, can alter my perspective so greatly, and I often wonder if this is so for others. And, I wonder how it is that I lived so long in place where a REAL, leaf-turning, hot-apple-cider-drinking, beanie-and wool-sweater-wearing, anticipation-inducing, crisp, cool air sort of autumn never, ever, presented itself. Perhaps that is why I always felt I was missing a part of myself there, and, on some level, why I felt so drawn to the Northwest. Because, after all, how can one feel complete if she rarely feels alive?

When I tell people that part of what brought me to Oregon was the rain and overcast sky, I usually get peculiar reactions. My mother - who was all but convinced that if I moved here I'd become depressed and suicidal within mere months - is still geniunely shocked to know that, each year, I look forward to the rainy season. Even after six years. She often asks when I will finally grow tired of all the rain, of all the "dreariness" and gray.

Each time, for one brief moment, I open my mind to the possibility, but then, I am bombarded with images and ideas, thoughts of everything that the rain is to me; that is all it takes. And so, I always smile and say confidently, "Never."