Peeling leaves off the pavement with the rake feels akin to peeling my skin off my bones when I go through the photo album in my head, plagued with favourites, shot dead with videos I've forgotten until they play idly through my mind like good dreams turned bad, rotten like the leaves on the driveway.
They can fossilize there. I flap my hands at the uselessness of it all.
Who cares if the leaves become part of the fabric of this Collective? Who cares if I abdicate any proof of one season into the next by force or neglect? Is there a clear winner? Is there any difference? Who cares if I buy Christmas presents when what we needed and never received was time? You can't give time. It's a construct, an idea brought in to force routine and routine and habits are what we live by.
Who cares if fall ends and winter begins? I'm not a winter person but I try to embrace it with oatmeal and hot chocolate and tiny lights, with Christmas movies and fresh-baked bread and long racuous or sometimes quiet dinners and sledding in the mountains. I don't snowboard any more. Too many serious injuries. We are too fast and too violent for sports like that. The competitive spirit comes alive and we will run over or throw down each other in an attempt to be first and when one of us (me) is completely deaf to the shouted warnings and five feet tall you don't want to be responsible for hurting her.
Ha.
Irony, like snow, is rare here on the point but on point always.
The lights are on though. The leaves are gone and done and we'll put up the tree in honour of those who only get to celebrate Christmas through us, by proxy sometime maybe in a week or two.