Remembering Autumns Past

 Today I am sipping slowly on the last few steeps of a roasted oolong I acquired some few years ago. It is sweet and comfortable, lingering just enough in the throat and on the breath to speak to its quality. It has a pleasant fruit-like sourness along the sides of the tongue that I have associated with good roasted oolong ever since my first encounter with tieguanyin many years ago. 

The bag has enough leaves left for perhaps one more session yet. Soon it too will fade like everything else must. I will remember it fondly as I search for another tea to take its place in my stash. I hope that everyone else can have a similarly good session with their tea of choice. May it be comforting to you in precisely the ways you need.

Happy Tea Drinking.

p.s. I want to try something new. I have been journaling in an abstract manner for several years now. It isn't consistent, but when I do latch on to some topic or memory or other, my pen sometimes writes something I find worthwhile. 

I'd like to begin sharing these little diversions with anyone who happens to stumble on this blog. Maybe they will evoke some emotion from you, unnamed reader, or at least be an entertaining read for a few minutes.

I grew up in a suburban part of the southern San Francisco Bay Area in an area lovingly referred to by real estate agents and residents alike as "Birdland". Not a nod to Charlie Parker, but rather because some city planner had elected to apply the names of birds to many of the small, maze-like streets in the neighborhood. The street I grew up on did not have a bird designation, but it did possess another common feature of the neighborhood; ginkgo trees. 

What we know of as the ginkgo tree is the last living species of an order of trees that first appeared before the first dinosaurs. Something about them has always made them look, to me, like they belong to the ancient world. Their trunks and bark have a particular gnarled quality that made me envision primordial forests. Their branches reach towards the sky while becoming almost impossibly thin at the crown, as though the tree itself could just barely muster the strength to grow that tall.  

In early Fall they produce orange stone-fruit-like berries that smell horrible when they are crushed, which was inevitable given that they covered the sidewalks of my street in little oases of treachery. As children we learned quickly to sidestep these minefields while walking or skip whole sections of pavement on our bicycles as not to carry away the stinking, pulpy remains in the crevices of our shoes or tires. During that same season, however, the trees also have vibrant yellow leaves which seem to catch and magnify the light of the sun in a way that makes them burn like little stars all by themselves.

It was these same leaves that would, if the weather was just right, fall from the trees in one torrential flurry to blanket the roads in a layer of golden yellow several inches deep. Sometimes, if the stars aligned and the powers that govern the earth and the weather allowed, this blanket would fall during a period where no cars were parked along the roads. The leaves would pile so high sometimes that they rose above the edges of the curb, blurring the border between the blanket of leaves and my neighbors' lawns. It was as if, over night, the street was transformed into one vast, golden ocean. Our imaginations would carry the border all the way to infinity.

We could walk, leaves covering our shoes up past our ankles, our passing creating great, rustling sighs with every step as though the waves of that ocean were crashing all around us. The wind would propel great stirrings of leaves such that the surface was every bit as alive and tumultuous as oceans made of water. For a few perfect hours we were as ships, the warm sweet smell of leaves filling our noses and carrying us away from the realm of the otherwise mundane.

Gradually the sun and the air and the tires of cars would cause the sea to recede, leaving us only with the memory of the brief and fantastical transformation. The ginkgoes would stand as skeletons for the remainder of the year, surrounded and obscured by the army of evergreens thoroughly represented in the neighborhood.

Children have the tendency to mythologize their experiences and we were no different. This pure uncynical way of viewing the world is something that seemingly only belongs to the young and the naïve. How tragic that we seem to outgrow this tendency, for now I must work so hard to put feeling to page in a manner that is doomed to barely come close.