The In-Between Season

Every season has its own beauty, especially the in-between ones. We're in an in-between season now: it's not really fall, although most of the leaves have fallen, and it's not really winter yet, although it has already snowed twice, once even enough to blanket everything and stay put for two days. This is like limbo, a waiting season before hibernation, when trees and plants and animals and sometimes even people retreat and anticipate the warmth and renewal of spring.

Instead of anticipating what's to come, I revel in what's here now and what I remember of other in-between seasons years ago.

As a child, I leapt into leaves raked by my father into large piles, covered myself with them, lay back and inhaled their woodsy-chipped aroma, their brittle crunch making a kind of brittle ear pillow. I walked through the woods behind our house, rat-a-tat-tatting the leaf-strewn ground, chirruping a response. I wandered the creek where leaves stuffed what might have been waterfalls and eddies. I encouraged my cat Friday, a marmalade stripe, to jump into the leaves so deeply that only her ears gave her away. I picked at the leaf-bits clinging to my dungarees, charmed by the sharpness of mere flakes.

Today, on my way home from village errands, I remembered my leaf joy and marveled at the browning landscape and the play of sunlight darting among resting trees.