The Leaving of the Leaves

Yesterday was our first cold day of the season. For my friends in California, that means the temperature was around 30, not 50. After five years living in Santa Cruz, four years in DC, and then five years in the SF Bay Area, I’m enjoying living in a place that has four distinct seasons (both DC and Northern California only have two seasons: summer and winter – they’re both nice in CA, and miserable in DC). The only season I don’t like here in PA is the summer – too hot and humid. But the spring and fall are very pleasant, and I like having snow in the winter. While I sometimes miss the perpetual pleasantness of the Bay Area weather, having real seasons lends a certain rhythm and a distinct emotional quality to each part of the year.

With age, your perception of time changes – it goes by much more quickly than when you’re young. I think what triggers the change is the end of your formative experiences. For example, I could instantly tell you which years I spent in middle school, high school, and college. But with grad school and subsequent jobs, I’d have to do some math in my head - or maybe look at my resume - to tell you exactly what I was doing in any given year. The exceptions would be my wedding and the birth of Kai, since those were experiences that happened after college which were truly unlike anything I had previously encountered. What keeps the earlier memories vivid is the fact that there are so many that involve experiencing various things for the first time. So as you get older and the truly novel experiences in life become more infrequent, the days tend to blur into each other - maybe dying brain cells have something to do with it too. The changing of the seasons counteracts the tendency towards bluriness - it prods you to stop, look around, and appreciate what you see.

All that from looking at some leaves on the ground.