My mom told me the other day that fall is her favorite time of year. It gets her reminiscing about being a young mother and having me and my older sister Jessica at home with her, before we started school.
Every week my mom would rake the lawn, creating enormous piles of leaves for us to run and dive into. And almost daily we would pack snacks and head off into the Maine woods to traipse around. One day we found a group of flat rocks that looked like beds, covered by trees and separated from each other by vines, on a steep bank. From then on we visited our rock house often.
Decades later, those little hikes through the woods, discovering thickets of trees to play hide-and-seek in or sunning ourselves on big slabs of rock, still give me a hankering for the woods when the air cools off, the nights arrive earlier and the leaves begin their polychromatic transformation.
So on a breezy sunny day last week my friend Jacob and I, armed with two iced teas, a bag of Doritos and a gigantic chocolate chip and peanut butter cookie (Mom definitely packed healthier snacks than I do), set out to do a little exploring on Mount Tom. We drove into the heart of the mountain through the Route 141 exit and headed towards Bray Lake.
We drove right past it. It was so freakishly small we thought it was just a pond. We consulted a few teenagers who were fishing for small-mouth bass—one of them caught a bluegill while we were standing there—who assured us that we had indeed stumbled upon Bray Lake. (Turns out size doesn't actually matter.)
The first thing I noticed when we started walking around the perimeter of the lake was the abundance of dragonflies. Big ones, tiny ones, crazily colored ones—they were everywhere, flitting from one patch of grass to the next. There is also a sizable beaver population at Bray Lake, as evidenced by the numerous chewed trees littering the shore line.
Jacob and I walked along in serene silence, never straying too far from one another, each lingering in different spots to drink in the majestic beauty of the mountain. We passed moms with kids and dogs in tow, older couples taking an amiable stroll through the trees and young punks like ourselves trying to breathe some fresh mountain air instead of city smog for a change.
The more steps I took on the trail, the lighter I began to feel. As I felt the breeze rustling my hair, I also felt the weight of the outside world lifting off my soul, almost as if somehow this crisp, clean air were cleansing me from within. My troubles seemed so small in the face of a force as powerful as nature.
I agree with my mom—fall is the best time of the year. But I think I've finally figured out why. It's not just the memories of childhood romps through the forest, leaf pile dives (which I still do to this day) or even the fact that my birthday is in the fall that makes it such a special season to me. It's the promise of rebirth, of another chance. Nature's cycle is coming to an end for the year, but spring is right around the corner, and nature will get another crack at it.
We, like nature, constantly get another crack at life. It's just that sometimes it takes a cool mountain breeze, a stroll through the woods and a big old pile of leaves to remind us.?
