Autumn arrived today.

I watched it pour in through the mountains.  I felt it in my body.  It came angry, wind blowing, purple gray sky.  The hawks flew overhead without regard for the proximity of people below.  Swooping through the sky like demons, riding savage gusts.  

From the parking lot I looked out to the field.  A woman was yelling.  She threw down her shovel and pulled her hat off.  The sun tore through the sky for a moment, ripping heat.  I assessed the tantrum with distant curiosity.  I recognized the energy.  I could taste the madness.  Like the sting of szechuan buttons - fireworks on the tongue.  With the rational removed, all that remains is a delightful or unbearable sensation.  She was still so angry and now hiccuping with tears.  I almost got in my car.  I almost whistled past the flames and returned to all the other important things I had planned for my day.  

It wasn’t just her fury that moved me, but the eventual embarrassment I knew would follow.  I walked slowly toward her.  I respected her anger - or rather the expression of it.  I wasn’t thinking, I respect the expression of her anger, as I walked across the pavement.  I didn’t know I respected it until later, when I returned home and I felt the same rise up in me only to be shoved back in.  

I picked up a shovel.  Inside I was thinking, I’m here to help.  But it wasn’t a benevolent thought.  I didn’t want to be there.  I didn’t want to spend my Friday afternoon digging up thistle.  Other times I may have wished for a larger audience, more people to see the compassionate gesture.  I considered, maybe without so many words, Isn’t this interesting that I’m not thinking about being a good person?  

Usually that - telling myself I’m good - serves as motivation for this kind of volunteering.  I realized later that my impetus was selfish in a different way.  Later, I would think, I did it because I was attracted to her outburst.  Attracted to her unstoppable honesty. 

When autumn slaps my face and the screeching sun moves in and out of clouds, tormenting my body with warmth and its denial, I also rage against the storm of Colorado’s dying summer.  Most of the time, however, it comes out sideways.  It is labyrinth in here, and does not allow for direct expression.  Instead, I calmly watch the hawk, quietly notice the intermittent chills, and let my hair be blown in all directions.  Eventually, I crawl into dark habits, make false prayers and invent manners of self sabotage.

When we finished with the hard work she turned to me, “I’m sorry I couldn’t control myself earlier.  Hopefully someday I’ll be more evolved.”  

I responded with a friendly hug, “Oh stop, it makes you more relatable.”  She seemed comforted by the comment, less embarrassed.  

Later, like right now, I wonder, would it have been more honest to tell her I thought the tantrum intriguing?  And that the sweet humility in her eyes when she apologized, when the weather paused to watch her with me, was like looking at treasure?