les tableaux

Ah, the feeling of autumn calm. It's strange how the transition from season to season is always so peaceful, and the chill smell in the air of this almost-winter time is always so fantastic. I suppose it's one of those relaxing constants in life, like coming inside on a rainy day and burning your tongue on a hot cup of fruit tea or the way your mouth feels after playing bassoon duets or sitting on your front porch before sunrise and watching the world wake up.

It's so hard to believe that this is my last year in high school, my last fall-winter in this house sitting on my heater when it's California cold outside and I'm bundled up in front of the fireplace watching old movies and reading Civil War books. I wonder if things will strike me differently, if reading biographies of eighteenth and nineteenth century political figures in the autumn (it's tradition) or taking long baths with vanilla soap in the winter will feel strange elsewhere. I suppose they will; I remember Santa Cruz winters smelling like flood water, and here the rain just leaves the scent of wet pavement. But then, maybe they won't -- because waking up in November-December has always felt the same with its breaths that seem to take in small bits of history (which is somehow part of every season), homemade pumpkin seeds, and some semblance of mud and leaves and that old-heater smell all wrapped in one.

And maybe these are the memories that stick with you the longest, the little things that never go away, the pangs of nostalgia that seem to transcend time and space but always return when the days get shorter and the morning sun shines brighter.

Any sort of diary opens a window into the life of the individual who writes it; and so, as a great beginning, I christen this journal with three dreams, and three wishes, and three aspirations.

I. I dream.

1. Of love, in that classical sense.
2. Of wild things that just can't be.
3. Of times in which I've never lived.
   

1. I lived and slept in the world's largest libraries, with every book I could ever imagine at my fingertips.
   
2. I had been born in one of the eras past that I so often dream of.
3. My first language had been one other than American English.
   

1. To one day open up an independent bookshop and café that would not fall prey to corporate conglomerations.
2. To write a great book; likely nonfiction, but perhaps of the historical novel persuasion.
3. To become a teacher, or professor, in order to light the world with my visions of the past.