Thank god for the gold-red leaves for without them, I think there’d be no color. Old relatives like dead leaves fall off shriveled-brown-unnoticed and swept to the side, the cold takes them, a different kind of harvest. In the morning it’s gray with furrowed brows on the horizon, a dead end street that leads to the lake. And coming back, the pine needles on the roadside shoulders: the dead make patterns on the edges, the romance of the fall is in the end, the end we all need to remake ourselves after a long sleep, to rise and fall the same as we always have, to fall and disappear unnoticed, to rise again with the same dreams, to forget what they tried to tell us.

Categories: musings, poetry, prose

Tags: aging, fall poetry, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, William Pearse writer