Holiday Soup

The woods are newly bare now; and I feel fine these days. A November gale has been rushing over my homeland gathering drifts of leaves around every corner; upon every curb and fence…. Piles of brown, yellow, red, burgundy; piles of colors are everywhere and streams of colorful leaves rush down streets, caught in the wind, inches off the ground, as if they were alive and had somewhere to go.

The hills off to the east and south, no longer green, have taken on the look of Thanksgiving; gray landforms rising up to meet a delightfully overcast November sky. The hills are still a little spangled with only the loosely leaved and brilliantly yellow poplar crowns.

The sights and smells of the Earth bring forth in my mind a sense of holiday; a sense which has become like a drink or dish; a delicate fusion or blend of distinctly separate tastes. The new blended emotions, so well developed within my library of experiences seems to have become a new and whole emotion on its own self.

Holiday Soup; an emotion developed over my life-experience is a nearly perfect blend of exuberant happiness and glee, hope, giving and receiving, thanksgiving, gratitude, profound joy, anxiety, sorrow, worry and profound fear. It is like a well designed exotic potage that is both sweat and sour blended such that, upon tasting it, you can’t decide which it is.

I suppose, as human adults with some years of life-experiences, it is only right and correct that what were, in our childhoods times pure and simple joys have been gently laced with sadness and mild disappointments to outright tragedy; and we are left with a completely evolved outlook on the Holidays that feels inside me like a reluctant anticipation to a pleasant process.