Autumn

is certainly my favourite season, surely.

I spend a fair amount of time at school staring out of the windows. What is it they say? Things change and stay the same. At school I stared out onto the quad and watched the swallows swoop up into their nests in between the mortar and the roof tops. At Uni in Amsterdam I stared out onto a canal and 7 geese that came to rest on the opposite bank, through thick thin snow and sun, until one day when there were only 6. Back in Edinburgh, studying, I'd scrutinise the wall instead, because the window was too small and facing the wrong way (up-ish) and besides it was time to buckle down and work by then. I had to, after all those years of staring out of windows.

But that's behind now, and I look out of new windows, facing Mt Zao to the south and the smooth lump and craggier description of, respectively, Hayama-san and Gas-san to the south. The teachers room doesn't face that way though, so I snatch glances when I can. This morning was the first time since last winter that the haze burned off and both Hayama and Gassan were sharp to the eye as a knife to the heart. There's still snow on Gassan, I guess from last winter (you can ski in summer there).

Elsewhere there's all kinds of flowers out. Cosmos, the purple pink petals that fade and fray at the edges as they die. Kinmokusei, tiny little beads of yellow that nestle in between otherwise unobtrusive and ordinary green leaves. The smell is otherwise, once you get close enough. Then there's some other ones I don't know the names of; then there's the persimmons. Orange and big as a kid's fist, growing brighter even as the tree grows blacker and hardens against the cold, as the leaves curl and fall until the whole thing resembles an absurd and living chandelier, outside.

Then the leaves. I've never seen prettier reds oranges yellows and all between.