Story-A-Day #329: Piles

PILES

They crop up everywhere, piles of leaves that weren't there the day before.  It's a natural part of the season, a scraping up of the summer leftovers, discarded remnants of a season just dying off.  The thing is, when it comes to death, seasons and people are no different.

Have you ever been around someone who is preparing, wittingly or not so much, to exit this mortal coil.  Things become different.  People become different.  All sins are forgotten, all grievances overlooked, and the beatification of the individual becomes the soul focus.  The sole soul focus.  Only the best of the individual reamins, as though all else was just a fleeting moment.

The same thing happens when a season gives up its tenure and passes the reigns on to the next in succession.  When autumn dies off, it is through a gradual burial under the white opprossion of winter.  When winter dies off, it is a slow and steady decrease in strength that eventual collapses under the heat of spring.  When spring dies off, it does so willingly, quite content to have blazed a trail for summer.

But when summer dies, it does so with great remorse.  Summer is the season people cling to.  It is a time of warmth and promise, and bright, long days.  As the rakes crawl across the fading longs and scrape up the magnificent fallen coats of the trees, summer clings hard.  Sometimes summer will reemerge in a late-season blast of heat and sunshine.  Sometimes summer will sulk of into hibernation.

Most years summer laments its own passing.  It revolts against the piled up leaves, the memories of warmer, sunnier days, with gusts of fierce wind.  The thing is, autumn holds dominion over all other seasons.

It holds the secrets to graceful transition beneath those piles of leaves.  Autumn knows better that all seasons, that the passage of time is transient.  Autumn knows best how to cut short the reign of its precursor, and cut short the tenure of its successor.

Beneath the piles of summer, autumn confines the secrets to transitions.  Autumn facilitates the passage from life to death and into rebirth.  Beneath those autumnal piles, new life begins, and old life passes onwards, carried away by a cold blown kiss.

Such is the nature of autumn, an omniscient and powerful force that dictattes the rules fo nature unlike any of its contemporaries.  That is why autumn commands so much power.  It can grace us with the best of summer late into the year, or hammer us with the worst of winter long before winter has any claim to its rightful dominion.