I can see for miles, miles, miles

There's something about fall that reminds me of going to the post office in France. This is weird, I know. I've spent countless falls in America, and exactly one in France, and still grey skies and wet leaves remind me of France. The leaves were hardly even wet in France. And, to be honest, there were very few trees with leaves in my part of France, either.

But there was an afternoon, once, when I lived in France, that must have been in October or November. And I needed to mail a package back home--a tiny little package that the French mail clerk eyed skeptically because it may have been too small for the international mailing labels. It was grey out--which was unusual for Perpignan--and windy, which was not at all unusual. It may have even been raining a little. And I put on my coat and walked through campus and around and up the street to the post office and missed pumpkins and fall festivals and baking and Halloween, and apples and pumpkin patches and cider.

What's interesting, though, is that even though I missed my American fall, and even though I was in the thick of my I-hate-France-and-don't-have-internet phase, it felt right. To be missing things. To be walking in the grey to the post office to mail a package to Kili. It felt right to be in a coat, and to walk back home to take it off and start making dinner.

And even though I went back home to my tiny studio, I felt expansive. Fall feels, somehow, despite sweaters and time indoors and close quarters, expansive. Like I'm lifting over something, or maybe right in the middle of it, spreading out into its edges and corners.

Also, brown sweaters just look really good on me.