More notes on autumn

Today the weather was clear for once with a nice broad and blue sky and a very crisp, but not too cool airflow going through the city. The sunlight cast everything aglow in a very autumny manner that made me miss the autumnal turn of places like Illinois and Oregon where I know them best. I remembered days at the races, the way the earth shook with hundreds of runners in a stampede competing for the finish line three miles away beneath the spotty shade of sparse forests whose leaves had been all but flushed with my favorite hormone, ethylene.
I miss even the rain that lights up those autumn leaves, giving them a psychedelic glow on a still and gloomy street in Oregon.
I miss walking home from school in Illinois as leaves fall like a slowed-down contemplative scene in a movie, or the way the pumpkins used to ripen in the back field, seemingly floating on that open sea of grass and dirt at a glorious sundown like buoys spread out all across the waters. I miss the golden hue the setting sun would cast upon the prairie and the pick up of winds that shook the house at night while I was bundled up reading a book, babying my sore legs after an intense cross-country practice. I miss walking up the steps of the Mill St. Shithole to my attic space, turning on the computer as soon as I slopped off my rain-drenched clothes... reaching over my bed to plug in the Christmas lights and then keep putting off my studies to have flirtatious, intriguing AOL Instant Messenger chats with this girl named Shawna.
I miss perusing the video store with Seth looking for a suitable couple of horror films to watch in the preceding excitement of Halloween, which to this day remains a favorite pastime of mine whenever I return home, regardless of the date's proximity to October 31st. I long to take a permanent marker and trace out a foolish design on a big orange pumpkin and then systematically disembowel it and carve it, just as I would a cadaver in the anatomy lab (it always comes back to that, you see). And then with the assistance of my mother to butter and salt all of the seeds and bake them in the oven, waiting for my brothers to come home from school marking one less day until Halloween.
Today, walking along a city street flashes of these sorts of memories struck me in succession and I thought about them a little bit. In conclusion, I love the autumn, and I really do miss the experience of it in the places with which I'm most accustomed. Autumn should be okay here, an experience at least, a growing one so to say. One thing though, I will be spending Halloween in Shangrila... more on that to come of course.