Ode to Autumn

Courtesy of La Tartine Gourmande

I love the changing of the seasons. There's a kind of sadness that you feel in your blood, the changing of your body rhythms, night, day. Watching the resplendence of spring lounge under the hot haze of summer. And then after such fullness, the earth cleanses itself again, shedding its leaves like an old skin. But all this happens in a big fire of color and symphony and wonder. I hate the years when fall lasts all of six minutes before that bear of a New England winter settles down until sometime in March. And I am trying not to that that so much.

So, in honor of the loveliness of fall, I'm posting this poem by the wonderful John Keats called "Autumn":

Let it be

Today has been a rough day. Every year on this day, we Americans, New Yorkers, remember where we were, what we were doing. Everyone marks this day in their own way. And now it's been ten long years, and we say goodbye to a decade lived under the shadow of the Twin Towers.

I can remember passing under them as a kid, bending my head as far back as it would go and still unable to see the top of the World Trade Center buildings. There was almost something sacred about them, that something in this world was bigger than me. It's like a punch to the gut to see the Manhattan skyline with those buildings missing like a giant gaping hole. And more, to think of all those trapped inside, how when the buildings fell, they took 3,000 innocent lives with them.

I visited Ground Zero for the first time in early October 2001, only a few weeks after the attacks. There was a makeshift chain-link fence set up around the site which, then was still a smoldering, dark, smoky pile of horrifically twisted steel.


I will never forget, as long as I live, what it felt like, smelled like, walking down that long block to Ground Zero, made eerily still by the death that, too, had passed by. Everything was still covered in a thick, powdery grey ash, like a blanket laid over a body at rest. The dust caked cars still left there, shoes, crushed phones, abandoned ambulances, blown out shop windows and apartments. I will never forget turning from busy, bustling downtown Manhattan into what could only be described as a graveyard.  I could never fully describe the feelings that day, looking over the site, my parents, my family, New Yorkers to the core, weeping.