“I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, Possibilities

Field notes on the way to school: the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, texture of wet earth, someone’s coffee, mist, incoming rain… puddle! “No!”

“Why?”

Blue shoes muddied by the dew-drenched grass instead.

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 6

Apple trees. A breeze.  No, a gust, gale, burst! A flurry of leaves, in gold, amber, mustard, brown, orange, fiery—

“Fire engine!”

—reds, dancing, swirling, falling to the ground—

“Why?”

To die.

“Because autumn is here.”

Then, fortunately, arrival.

Drop-off. Knapsack: stowaway stuffed bear, toy car, miniature chocolate bar for courage. Permitted. Crisp and white and neatly lined notebook; perfectly sharpened and promising yellow pencil. “Don’t eat the eraser!”

“Why?”

Proustian whiff of graphite and pink rubber. All children could see, smell, taste, hear colours, once, when they were still

children,

somewhere, on the way,

watching the dust in the sun; following the ants; being side-tracked by the smell of a grilled cheese sandwich; noticing the moon, still up at eight, and a passing plane, and the peaking patch of sky—

“Why blue?”

—wondering if blue M&Ms and red taste the same; believing in the possibility of a rainbow of answers, and that

“a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,”

then something was lost, on the way, or perhaps on arrival.

Someone, once, on another notebook:

“When the leaves fall, autumn is here.

I like autumn.

How the trees look now!

Nature really is great.

If I was a painter, and it’s not out of the question that I’ll become one someday, since after all no one knows what their destiny may be, I would be most fervently an autumn painter. I’m only afraid that my colours wouldn’t be up to it.”

They would. I decide, will. “This afternoon, on the way home,” I promise and kiss,

they will look, smell, sound, taste brilliantly of puddles, grass, wind, leaves in fire-engine reds, pencil yellows…