Under the Trees

            Today's post is one of those rare reflective ones.  I'm afraid it will not provide any laughs.  But it will provide something that is, perhaps, more important.  It's something I wrote a while ago, something I consider to be one of my better pieces.  I hope you enjoy it.

It is fall.  The trees are changing colors, almost right before my eyes.  Winter is fast approaching, summer but a distant memory.  As I walk through the trees alone, I feel different.  When accompanied by a friend or family member on a walk such as this, I am, how should I say, buoyant, happy, maybe even joyous.  But when I am alone, I do not know, something changes.  I am not sad, nor lonely; it is a strange state of mind.  Reflective, some might call it, others might say brooding, but that would be incorrect, for brooding brings to mind unhappiness and I am not unhappy.  I think that reflective captures the mood the best.  Yes, I become reflective.  Of my past, others pasts, the future, even things beyond this world.

  I walk under the trees with a soft wind rustling the leaves and I think on these things with a rather detached air, as if I am but an observer of my own mind.  My emotions change as quickly as do my thought processes, but always the changing colors of the trees remain a perfect background, matching my thoughts, molding them you might say.  

A woman passes me with a polite nod, which I return.  Then she is gone, both from view and memory, like a passing thought that did not stay to ingrain itself.  And yet she leaves traces.  We have so many memories, as quick and fleeting as the woman was, or would have been to me.  I would never have thought of her again, but my mind attached a small significance to her and that little tag will create a small nook in my memory in which she will forever abide.  Had I not been alone I would not have even noticed her, she would have been only one of the countless people I encounter each day.  Another face to forget, or clutter the mind with as a well known sleuth may have put it.

The day is waning.  The light is fading as the sun slowly sinks beneath the horizon.  As the light disappears the cold asserts itself.  The breeze is no longer the soft flow of air that merely rustles the leaves.  It is swift and sharp, slipping through every crack in my clothing to find bare skin to chill.  I shiver and quicken my pace, my thoughts turning to more present events, thus ending the strange mood that comes when I walk alone, under the trees.