As I walked to the subway stop at 125th, I kicked insuspiciously a single dried yellowish brown leaf, scratching it along for a meter over the concrete, causing a ruffled noise, a noise that for a year almost I hadn’t heard but stepping on the dry sand spread on the dirt roads of the Aegaean Islands, indicating that autumn has started.
In the afternoon, I walk home as nature’s rain pours down upon us. I indulge in this fest like Kelvin in Tarkovsky, stoicly forming part in the sensation of the water purging my human sins. Calmly, I walk sternly forward, see each man protruding to catch a glimpse from beneath their umbrella’s under which, no behind which they shelter and hide from nature. Alas, how does modern man disgust being part of nature, and not mastering it. So, we cover ourselves in water-proof skin, hide under hollow artificial skies that deny the rain that’s falling, and we duck into the plastified porticos that extend our homes.
In the evening, through my open windows the rumbling of distant thunder, the constant battering of rain drops around the building, and the occasional drop of an accumulated ball of water on the metal cover of the air-conditioner. Autumn’s turning over the leaves, the wet and yellow winged keys of the green ashes are blown into the corners of city buildings. And so am I swiped into the corner of autumn, intrinsically part of it. I don’t know why, perhaps it is my Nordic constitution, but today is a beautiful day, my senses absorb the coming of autumn and the cycle of nature reaps the weakers parts to make room for new life, which promise blows over us.