Fall Metonymy

Bicycles, bastions, and battalions of paperclips. My head is a maze of metal and free-standing filo gunk. Alter arbitrary endings find us jaunting along the rifts of Mars for evidence of seashells, aliens, and microcosmic galaxies the size and shape of glass playing marbles, silty-sanded seawater blue in Florida's early June. Contrary to popular opinion, the masses have been realigned to find solace and slipsipious paramour along the shores of Eriadmoore beach. It is evident that even the apples on the fall trees speak of the summers spent growing, the microcosmic mosses of warm, moist fall afternoons, and the lighter, more delicate touch of sunshine that warms everything just enough, so that dew-cuffed courduroys and flannel shirts rolledup to the elbows promote a soft, just-warm feeling of red check and sweet green hay-grass partially cut to make way for paths between the fruit trees, carotid arthritic branches beckoning play and a climb to the top for the largest, most red apples. Fall is filled with anticipation of apple pies, rich oranges, blues and bumpy knuckle-knocked gourds rolling between haystacks and slow, rickety hayrides over mud-dusted dirt roads. Along the way, we spy orchards, netted blueberry gardens, rabbit holes, and miles of raspberry bushes, buzzing over with bumblebees and waxy-green folliage, chest-high and aligned in rolling road-rut patterns, and when perceived from afar, tastes like the quilt of my grandmother's summer parties and homemade apple pie. We roll home, full with the sugary-sweetness of caramel-nut apples and too many apple bites of braeburns, gala, and granny smith, to where hot tapioca fills the cavities of my mind, the egg whites just folded in and burning my mouth, my grandmother's, my mother's, and my own comfort food. Poets, scientists apple gatherers and literati collect on sunny late-afternoon orchard hills and look down on the September forests, green and lightly watercolored in reds, oranges, and yellows. The just-turning of the season not seen from gray-brown city streets and glowing radio towers comes into full bloom, a tempting scent, a black and white photograph of micological identification and sweet hay-grass apples, youthful profiles photographed on the hill, on ladders, baskets too full, the pickers too excited with the antiquated, intellectually quirky experience of gathering one's own fruits. The micology overflows the amateur literati, psychology, botanist, sustainable-scientist, biological programming, poets, and from this grows literature, twine-bound chapbooks, and a story read aloud on the banks of the dirt road beneath the pensive leaves falling to the sharp scent of detrital autumn: all that remains of the group on the banks, bags of apples in hand and time to pass.