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days like today, when fall is rapidly spinning into winter, it seems as though the world is soaking in a perpetual dusk. the light never brightens and the sun refuses to show even half her face through the clouds. the clouds that are all waiting, with bated breath, to spit out our first snow. i can see old man winter jumping from tree to tree on the coat tails of the wind. his feet and hands haphazardly knocking brittle leaves to the ground. the leaves, that are pushed into piles. scrunched into trash bags. chopped up. perhaps turned into mulch for someone's garden. thrown away with the rest of our waste. or burned. filling the air with my favorite smells. among the trees, where no man tends the ground, they continue to gather in layers of decaying life. soon they will rot completely under winter's blanket and seep slowly back into the earth whence they came. death breeds new life. the leaves remind me of...me.