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Autumn, today, is dying: shuffling belatedly and begrudgingly into winter. The two seasons shift and seethe, jockeying for dominance in a prancing, ill-rehearsed dance like a pair of sparring stags. Autumn of course will lose, but by no means gracelessly. Today she is going down in a positive blaze of theatrical heroism - exiting en pointe, facing the footlights and offering up a soaring valedictory aria in ochre and amber.
Down by the river the air in my lungs is alpine; as unforgiving as envy. I jog west with the sun at my breast and a fudgy patchwork of fallen leaves plashing crisply-crystalline underfoot. Despite the cold there are still skeins of rowers out on the water, slicing their quiet fractals into its olive green skin. Their boats skim by like a fleet of floating ribs, oddly divorced from their Paleocene parent.
Here on the path at my feet is half a squirrel. (The front half, I think, although grubby and tangled as cat-mauled knitting, it’s difficult to tell.) Poor little bugger. Nobody ever sings arias for roadkill. But if I were that severed squirrel, I’d not be ashamed to take this brief, gilded day for my wordless operatic elegy. Soon, after all, there'll be nothing left but a greasy, fur-flecked smear on the scuffed tarmac. And winter, by then, will have its triumph.
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