see beautiful

I wish you’d see yourself as beautiful as I see you.
Why can’t you see yourself as beautiful as I see you?
–The Avett Brothers, “Will You Return?”

Deep red sumac on the roadside and golden showers from the Chinaberry tree in our front yard.  A bit early to teach yesterday, I sat on a bench outside, gathering sunshine to take in to my students, since our need for computers prevented me bringing them out to the sunshine.

Today the sky is cobbled with gray clouds, white sunlight in the cracks between them.  The trees convince me that the Impressionists had it right with their tiny brush strokes in a multitude of colors.  The trees are not one color; a sweet gum riots in green and yellow, but at the end of one branch one scarlet leaf asserts originality.

The fall, more than other times, is a season made up of minute parts for me.  I look out and see not just the now, but the falls of other years all rioting together. This long ago became the season in which I learned to love my world — whatever world that happened to be at the time.  It holds the tremble of tag on frost-crisp nights outside a little stone church, paths raked in ankle-deep leaves, the rattle of bags full of acorns dumped down a playground slide, smoke-scent and banjo tunes beside a backyard fire, late-night laughter in a dorm room, library afternoons at tables covered with several people’s books and laptops, chilly mornings teaching kindergarteners to do jumping jacks and touch their toes, and hours reading on an English department balcony.

This year, I increase my list with a scarlet leaf at the end of my autumnal branch.  Having gathered sunshine for my Composition students, I went inside and taught the class, only to discover, when it was over, that I had more sunshine at the end of class than I had at the beginning.  Sunshine, gathered in a windowless classroom.

Next year, it will be just one bit of the leaf-pile into which I plunge with the turning weather.  But this week it shines vivid with its assurance that this, my newest world, is beautiful, too.