The Air is Changing

The air is changing. The transition from one season to another always fascinates me. Am I the only one? When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my aunt gave me a little black & red blank notebook. I didn't know what to put in, but after a friend's mother (who was a writer) suggested I can write and draw in it, I filled it with innocent little illustrated poems. About 95% of them were about spring, a season I had an undying love for (until I met spring allergies in Vancouver, I guess).

One day, a friend of my step-father came for a visit. He was a funny and also quite intense red-haired guy with a red beard and was a poet. I proudly presented to him my little book of poems about spring, where flowers, birds and butterflies reign supreme. He read the book from cover to cover (I'm sure that was fairly easy), and confessed he is really not all that interested in season. In return, he wrote a poem of his own in my notebook, which was somewhat repetitive and mostly talked about a tree of singing fruit that grew next to singing children, and then the singing children ate the singing fruit... (Oh well, I thought to myself, What a silly poem...)

Years later, my notebook is long gone: I have destroyed it in a rare purging moment as a result of embarrassment from how naive and pathetic all this spring love talk was). I was probably 10 or 11 then - and deeply involved in doing sketches in black charcoal and pencils. My naive expressions have turned into perfume, but thankfully I have way less of that destructive self-criticism than can prevent one from doing anything at all with their life from fear of not being validated by someone else who "knows". Add to that some more painful experience and dark moments and even the brightest flowers can be painted with more depth than to be dismissed as naive or innocent.

So back to the seasons I come. And as redundant as this topic might be, and probably is, if I glance at SmellyBlog from a bird's view and see how much I talk about them; seasons are always going to be an important part of my life. And so they should. It's the magic of the air changing, and feeling that something exciting is going to happen. Because even if it did happen a million times before us, there are going to be ever so small little details that will make this autumn special, this day unique and this moment - when we watch the sunset and know that it might be the last sunset that we ever watch and savour every stroke of elongated clouds on the horizon. And maybe every minute a baby is born, but today it's my friend's baby, and a new life begins.

So, I will just keep writing up my perfume related fall thoughts every September; salivate over the first snow like a little kid who's never seen it before; get excited for spring whenever its first signs arrive (usually by December 25th, actually... I pay a lot of attention to detail!); and pretend it's a summer beach day as long as the water temperatures is over 10c.