So I’m on Long Island.
Fall here is like a plate of cut/up crisp green apples and peeled cucumbers and maybe celery with a small fan directing the smell into your nose, and into your brain. At the risk of waxing excessisve, it’s like an unwarm shower on a hot day, the water cooling your scalp as you put your hair under the stream. It’s perfect in almost every way. It’s a weather I no longer know how to dress for, putting on a layer, stepping outside, putting on another, jumping up and down in the perfectly-asphalted driveway in a Dick Tracy backdrop to gauge if I’ll be warm enough, too warm once I get up and out and into the world of peewee football players and their matching littler sisters, already dressed as cheerleaders with matching team-colored ribbons in their hair.
It’s perfect outside, all blue sky and puffy clouds, phyllo-like leaves rutling by, forming tiny remolinos (whirlpools in the wind) and spinning off into the distance. Unexpected puddles that splorch when I step in them, wetting my socks and chilling my feet with a cold so sudden that it doesn’t register as cold at all, just as sharp.
Mainly, right outside, it feels a little bit like a bowling alley shoe. You put it on tentatively, not knowing if it will fit properly, or at all. Little by little, it becomes comfortable, but still not your own. In the end, you return it and put on your own well-molded-to-your-feet footwear. And now they feel strangely cold, yet exactly right. But you can’t go bowling in them. But how often do you really go bowling anyway?
