Camus said that "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." What I love about this quote is not just the hint at the beauty of changing leaves, which quite honestly no one really needs to indicate or prove. Instead, I love that Camus finds in the fall a remembrance of spring. Some have said that fall is spring's undoing, and I suppose in a literal sense this is true. Fall is the careful disassembling of spring's meticulous construction work. Just a few months prior, the scaffolding of tree trunks provided the support for Mother Earth to deliver her minerals from the mollisols and alfisols of Oklahoma's grasslands, carrying them high into branches of Red Maples, Blackjack and Shumard Oaks, American and Winged Elms, Sycamores, Pecans, and Poplars. As September and October days grow shorter, the leaves take their cues to send nutrients back into the soils, and with chlorophyll no longer in the way they allow other pigments like carotene and anthocyanin to take center stage, if just for a moment. The prairies are lit up in a weeks-long display of crimsons, golds, and magentas before the inevitable - but handsome in its own way - bleakness of winter.

But today it's not the changing colors of fall that have captured my drowsy attention. It's the shifting quality of fall rains. The rain too points back to spring. If the cloudbursts of March and April are the opening eyes of a hibernating landscape, then October's thunderstorms are its languid eyelids, gestures that the tired fields need their rest. And my moods match them exactly, drop for drop. In the spring, I look forward to the alarm-like start of April's downpours. They rouse me from my frosty dreams just as they do the land. I stir and I stretch and I arise, ready for new challenges, zealous for a bright sun. But I experience October rain in an entirely different way. Coupled with darker and cooler days, they tuck me in, bidding me "good night" at all hours of the day. They whisper "sleep" to an already listless mind, looking for any excuse to stay in bed just a little bit longer and go to bed just the slightest bit earlier. They are heavy blankets. They are lullabies.