I came bounding up the front stairs today, high on dental anaesthetic -- which reminds me that, yesterday, I ought to have put my dentist down as the Best Dentist in the east end of the city: Kathryn Shields, 330 Kingston Road, 416-694-8144 -- skipping over red and yellow leaves, soaking in the wind and marvelling at the balmy temperatures, when I came to a halt.
At the very edge of my toe and just about to be run over by my size ten boot, spun a little ladybug, dancing around and around in what looked like flights of imaginative fancy. (I have no idea what ladybugs daydream about, but whatever it is, I think it must be pretty wonderful.) About three inches from her, in fact, sat a small green spider, delicate and quite lovely against the darker green of the porch paint. The spider was just sitting there, probably watching the lady bug with the same wonder that I felt, wishing that he could find a way to manoeuvre his legs half as gracefully.
Another step up, a grasshopper leapt high into the air, colliding with a newly bloomed dahlia -- it's almost November -- bouncing up overtop of the flower and landing next to a yellow biden that was glowing in the sun. Around my head swarmed tiny fruit flies and an autumn wasp, who I thought would have long gone hibernating home for winter.
How can it be that what I remember as the snow-laden skies of Halloween have turned into the weatherman's "highs of 16" tomorrow? Since when did all the garden flowers hang on until the time when heavy frost was due in town? What happened to the chill of pre-Remembrance Day, when nothing struck the air but the sound of sixty-year-old cannons and a crispy leaf straying down from an over-burdened eave?
I know I'm supposed to hate it; to rail against what could be and likely are the dire effects of global warming. But there's something truly wonderful -- powerful, even -- in coming face to face with nature's bounties in late October.
Either that, or the anaesthetic hasn't worn off yet.
