I feel autumn coming in my bones. Summer’s last (I hope) heatwave broke yesterday with cool temperatures, clear skies and clear air. I’m slowly recovering from my allergies.
Autumn has, in my opinion, a distinctive smell about it, a moist coolness, similar to spring, but different since it follows on after summer’s scorched earth instead of winter’s icy clear. I smell this in the air before the leaves start to turn, and the smell reminds me of going to office supply stores to pick up school materials (a trip which I was inordinately fond of, showing me off as the geek that I am), windbreakers and pumpkin pie. My father and I were out driving yesterday and came upon a field full of pumpkins. It looked like a good crop.
I may have said it before, but I love the change of seasons. Maybe it’s a holdover from my childhood, but autumn and spring have a movement about them that excites me; a sense of going forward. You can get sick of winter whenever it refuses to leave (especially come April when you’ve put your snow shovels away), and they don’t call it the lazy, hazy days of summer for nothing, but spring and autumn have an energy about them that invigorates. And I think that’s why these two seasons are my favourite. Autumn nudges out spring (despite my allergies) because of the colours.
Erin’s getting ready to go for an interview (fingers crossed for her) and I’m preparing for the start of a temp assignment tomorrow. Is it a little odd to mourn what might be the end of a long and involuntary summer holiday? Or is it a fear of change; I’ve gotten used to being this idle, and I’m uncertain how I’ll cope becoming active again? Well, it’s not like I haven’t felt this feeling before. I’ll cope.
I have an interview on Monday morning. Wish me luck.
The Trenchcoat Farewell Project is going well. I’ve laid out all of Trenchcoat 1 except for Showdown. I just have to gather some materials for Erin’s The Memory of Trees and I can add that to my list of completed stories. Then, once I get Steve Wolterstorff’s approval for the edits of Evening Falls and Cameron’s final scenes for Shepherd Moons, I can say that I’ve laid out the first 200 pages of the project. I’m about a quarter of the way through.
Scanning is, by far, the longest and most tedious job of this layout work. Great big kudos and good thoughts to people like Pat Degan who submit their artwork to me electronically, saving me two minutes of thumb twiddling per picture. And a pox on IBM for producing a scanner that can’t scan at 600 dpi without going as slow as molasses on a January morning.
The only bad thing about autumn is that autumn leads into winter and, after Christmas and January, winter goes on too long.
Another year gone.