![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_7566.jpg\" "\\"Dear")
<\/a>Like a postcard: Brilliant, full Fall<\/p><\/div>\n
This is surely and truly fall, but only the fall of vacations and three-day weekends, a week in October or a Sunday afternoon drive to marvel at the show.\u00a0 These are the Great Autumns, the Autumns of memory to be toasted with chilled cider or mulled wine and orchards of apples and orange piles of pumpkins, but they are not the Autumns of Everyday.\u00a0 The workaday Fall is a wholly different event, a magical, captivating striptease, an infuriatingly slow and deliberate revealing of the beautiful and, alas, the stark.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Slowly slipping off the green<\/p><\/div>\n
Fall begins at a particular point, September 21 or 22 or23, at some altitudes and climates with nothing more than the announcement, “Welcome to the Show, boys, it’s the First Day of Fall.\u00a0 Here we are, me and my sisters, ready to reveal our delights.”\u00a0 And so the first few days or weeks there is nothing but the waiting, the watching, the wanting.\u00a0 It’s like you paid for the show and are sitting at the bar sipping your beer, wondering, “What’s wrong?\u00a0 When does it start?”\u00a0 And then, all of a sudden yet still gradually, you notice, at last, a patch of perfect golden leaves: the subtle slip of a strap off the shoulder, the top button undone.\u00a0 The tease has begun.<\/p>\n
<\/a>A Sexy Fan Dance behind the evergreens<\/p><\/div>\n
Even with the performance beginning, this stripper is hesitant, slow, deliberate and, you wonder, maybe a little shy even. \u00a0 She knows she has plenty of time and a completely captive audience.\u00a0 Day after day, you watch these alluring trees, watch as they gradually slip off another strap, unfasten another hook, slyly giving you a peek at what comes next, the raw beauty you’re waiting to see.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Daring tree, alone, showing her loveliness<\/p><\/div>\n
Sometimes in the season, a lone tree will have finally turned completely golden or red.\u00a0 How daring of this brazen lady to show you her charms a little ahead of the others.\u00a0 You are taken by these few bold souls, smitten by their color, their attitude.\u00a0 Soon, though never soon enough, their sisters join them and finally, after they have slipped off their green, all is revealed.\u00a0 But not quite.\u00a0 We wish this was the end of the show, but it’s not.\u00a0 Autumn is like a striptease where you go only to see the lovely lingerie, brilliant, sexy, bright underwear.\u00a0 “I’m ready to leave now,” you say to yourself, satisfied with this sensual treat, but alas, you live here too.\u00a0 These sweet ladies, the fall trees surround your home, the roads you take, the places you work and shop.\u00a0 And so, like it or not, the show continues.\u00a0 “You wanted to see it all?” they say.\u00a0 “Fine.\u00a0 Get ready for the full frontal, because Sugar, it ain’t gonna be very pretty from here on.”<\/p>\n
<\/a>Fully exposed<\/p><\/div>\n
And so, day by agonizing day, the show does goes on, clasps further unhooked, skimpy things slipped lower, lower, lower, ’till at last one day, maybe after a ferocious storm has helped finish the job, the poor trees stand fully revealed, naked to your and my embarrassed eyes, naked to the heavens, before God himself.\u00a0 You try to appreciate, try to remember the trees’ beauty, cruelly echoed now only in stark outline.\u00a0 You gaze at the now nude trees and realize our common barrenness, the bare-ness we all hide under bright frippery, colorful togs, witty words.\u00a0\u00a0 This dis-clothes-ure has become a full disclosure.\u00a0 You bow your head in sorrow, in shame, in humility, praying for garments fitted for every living thing from trees to you and me and all creation in-between, clothes that will neither brighten nor dim, neither mask nor fall away, true clothing that suits, for now and always.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Naked along the Potomac<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About three hours west of here, close to the sources of the great Potomac which these days saunters lazily by our apartment, a small community in the Appalachians is convening a five-day festival called Autumn Glory.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure scores … Continue reading