If my life were a movie I was watching...

If my life were a movie I was watching, I would be concerned about the symbolism of my walk to the bus. It was cool and wet, a grey sky, and the sidewalk was, for the first time this year, littered with the leaves falling off the trees. They were not big, palmate leaves like you get from a maple or an oak, but the small, pinnate leaves that grow dozens to the branch and litter the ground like autumn confetti.

Since my life is not a movie, I found it extraordinarily beautiful. I board the bus at the West Transfer point, which is nestled just South of a strip mall, but just North of a commercial/research park that features lots of prairie-style greenspace. As you look South from the sidewalk, you see a large expanse of tall, uncut wild grass, sporadically interrupted by craggy trees, the kind of trees with the writhing trunks that seem, in Winter, to claw at the cold grey sky.