For the last few days, since Daylight Savings Time changed, and while the weather has been so crazy-nice, I've been taking my morning cup of coffee out to the porch and sitting on one of the chairs out there to drink my coffee and watch the sun rise and the leaves fall. There's a bigassed oak tree in front of the next-door neighbors' house and a couple of maples up the street to the west, so there's all sorts of color out there right now. My zinnias and marigolds are still blooming away with might and main, too. The natural color-scheme outside is very “1960s Psychedelic Rock Album Cover.” All that color, and the steamy coffee clouds makes a pleasant segue from the state of sleep and dreams into the world of wakefulness and consciousness.
As much as I hate winter, I actually like autumn quite a lot. I get a feeling of being just about to go on an adventure when the seasons are on the balance between one and the next. The unpredictable, but generally decent weather means that it'smostly pleasant to be out and about, and I've had some of my better outdoor adventures during this time of year.
One time, back in highschool, I went out to the dam on a late October friday night, hoping that someone I knew wasw out there hanging out, and lo, I did run into a group of my buddies who had decided to camp out for the weekend. They had a little campfire going and we decided to start burning shit. One of the guys had a yearbook he didn't want, so that was burned as an effigy. Another dude had a bunch of firecrackers in his car, so we stuffed a beer-can absolutely full of firecrackers and chucked that into the fire and ran!There was much explodey. While we were standing back away from the firecracker bomb, I found a couple of good-sized clumps of sagebrush, so I grabbed big double-handful of the stuff, and when we went back to the fire, I pitched the sagebrush into the flames. Some years later, a friend of mine wanted to smudge her new house, and the smell of burning sagebrush took me right back to that bonfire, that pleasant night of sitting around with a bunch of teenaged jackasses, burning random shit.
Another time, a couple of years later, I was in college, in my dorm room in Edna Work Hall, flopped halfway across my bed, studying for my Government midterm. I wasn't studying very hard–I had my door open signifying that I didn't mind visitors, and who should drop in, but Todd. We were still in the awkward-flirting “I-like-you-do-you-like-me-too” stage of things. He asked me if I wanted to go out riding with him, and I was like, “sure, what the heck,” so I went down to the bike rack, unlocked my Huffy, and away we went. We ended up cruising all over town, just shooting the bull, then we rode out west of town on the wide shoulder of Highway 20, eventually stopping for a break at a huge mound of gravel which was part of a road construction project. Of course, this led to a make-out session that went a long way toward jump-starting our until-then tentative relationship.
I'm going out riding tonight with a bunch of guys, and while I know that no making out and probably no pyromaniacal pursuits are in the cards, I'm sure something fun and interesting will happen. I can just feel it in the air.