Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Fall Without Me

This morning I went jogging at a quarter to seven, watched my breath puffing into air I can no longer term brisk, or even chilly--it's unquestionably cold. The sky has turned a bright, hard blue like some splendid cabochet sapphire, and the trees are decking themselves in scarlet and gold. This morning there was not mist on the pond, there was FOG, no longer curling over the surface in polite tendrils, but piling its four-foot wisps into a monster column in the center that promised to ascend like Babel to the heavens and become a cloud. It's undeniable: it's fall without me. Without me in classes, buying books, arguing with the registrar's office, doing homework or ignoring it. My internal clock pleads with the weather to be sensible, to realize that since I'm not in school it can't possibly be autumn, that it's somehow got things dreadfully wrong. The sun seems as confused as I am, beaming brightly, determinedly, perplexedly down on a world it can touch but no longer warm, its rays still heavy with the strength of summer, but growing feebler, failing in the face of the cold breeze, rising later and setting earlier, growing too tired to stay awake. It's fall without me; I'm inside, wearing long sleeves like I have all summer in an office of perpetual winter, and only just noticing that it would be too cold to eat lunch outside if the sun weren't so warm on my back, and that soon I'll have to move my picnic indoors. I keep waiting for the semester to start, for the classes and the homework to start pounding in, but they don't come, and fall is whispering of winter.
It's finally beginning to sink in: I'm not a student anymore.