Autumnal Dance

I have always loved Autumn best.

One friend/mentor/teacher summed it up perfectly saying, "It's that delicious feeling of impending doom."

Northerners get it. I lived in Northern Alberta. Pretty way north. Autumn, like spring, was nearly - but not quite - instant. Palpable and ephemeral. As soon as the first hard frost happened Mom & Dad would plan our annual "leaf drive". It was an afternoon excursion into the hills and valleys (coolies) of the Peace Country in northern Alberta. A constantly undulating low-level flight that shifted from golden-gray harvested fields to riotously glowing stands of poplar, birch, willow and aspen shot through with the eternal green of conifers grown black-green with summer sun.

The trees either stood in tight copses on hills and along windbreaks or else filled the steep-sided ravines and coolies. The gravel roads we traveled would pitch and weave through this landscape as we "ooed" and "ahhed" when each new splash of defiant color hove into view. The Sun, now becoming perpetually low in the sky, would dazzle our eyes and make them water through our gleeful grins. Moments of peace, joy, unity and love in our family now flash frozen in my memory and gently cooled by the passage of time.

No music accompanied these trips - "AM radio only, please" in my parent's frugal cars. Just the soundtrack of gravel crunching and rapping under our car and our endless exclamations and comments.

"Oh, look there!"

"Nice reds!"

"It's a sea of gold."

We will go out for our new "leaf drive" soon. Our "version 1.2" of this family tradition incorporated music. I'd usually try to choose evocative favorites. We'd still comment - like we did on those "Christmas Light" drives, too. "Leaf drives" are better. We'd bask in awe of the handiwork of God, reminded of the gentle, powerful, creative and wise hand that shapes everything we experience. Even the agnostic and the atheist must respond with some sense of wonder, I suspect, when faced with such naked beauty and divine radiance.

This year will be different though, perhaps it's now "version 1.3". No children in the backseat. No warm family babble before, during or after. Like the leaves drifting from the trees, our children are dancing ever farther from our reach.

The delicious feeling of impending doom rises.

I will program some music for our drive though. Some companions are constant. Surely some Jack Semple from his wonderful instrumental album "Qu'Appelle" - one place we will surely drive to and through.

New Dala will be played from their summer 2009 release "Everyone Is Someone". Their fourth original CD and my second acquisition - better than the last one, which was better than most anything else I've heard in a very long time.

I'll choose some Mark Knopfler from his wide catalog and especially his new release "Get Lucky".

And there will be new and old favorites too. Some Joshua Radin, some Willie Nile, some Jerry Proppe, some Dixie Chicks, some Ian Hunter, some Emmylou Harris, some Robert Plant with Alison Krauss, some Jon Bauer, a smidgen of Tinted Windows and some John Fogerty.

And we'll dance the Autumnal Dance in a brand-new old-fashioned way.

Why don't you make your own playlist and join us? Can't you feel it rising - that feeling? Don't you want to dance too?

Shalom