But there was something about October in L.A. that always made me want to take off for parts unknown without any forethought. I'd jump in the car and drive east to the desert, or north to Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, or San Francisco, or south toward San Diego. And once I got there, once the feverish rush of traveling had subsided, I'd feel...nothing. My wanderlust may have been satisfied, but a sense of disappointment always remained. I didn't know what I was looking for, just that I somehow had to try to find it.
So I was completely unprepared for my first autumn in New York. In late September the vault of the sky, which was generally blue anyway (unlike L.A., where a decorator might describe the sky as being a muted buff color), became a deep cobalt, punctuated by towering, fluffy white clouds. Now the sun, changing its angle and moving up the sky, shone a bit more brightly, creating sharp-lined shadows on the grass and throwing the still-green leaves on the trees into many-faceted relief. A delicious, mildly cool breeze offset the warmth of the sun. Nights were keen and clear, with a hint of woodsmoke on the wind and the eerie honking of skeins of Canada geese overhead. Apples, pumpkins, and squashes began appearing everywhere. For the first time in my life I experienced the deep pleasure of a mug of hot, fresh-pressed apple cider with spices and a tot of rum mixed in.
And then there were the neighborhood trees, the oaks and maples. At first there wasn't any noticeable change; their leaves were still green, or so I thought. When I next looked out of the window, I saw fading greens and browns; then in rapid succession came purples, oranges, burgundies, and every hue in between: visual music. It became a thrill to go to the post office, a couple of blocks away, because my route took me through a thickly wooded area in which no color was repeated twice.
Back in L.A. I had thought the calendar photos of New England in the fall were a bunch of tourist propaganda. Now I was beginning to understand that the richness of life is best appreciated through the processes of change and contrast. I was realizing that in the presence of stagnation, a person backs up into themself, just the way a silted-up stream slowly goes dead. In L.A., perhaps unconsciously realizing that autumn meant the death of another year, I had tried desperately to move, to open my channels, to break down the self-created dam that was causing my stagnation, but I hadn't gone far enough.
Perhaps there will come a time when the pleasures of October in the East will no longer be enough to keep my internal waters flowing, but for now I am content to remain here, enjoying each season in its turn.
