My Favourite Place

Firework Forest

My favourite place can't be found on a map. The CIA's satellites haven't tracked it down yet. My favourite place moves as the times change; it has travelled a continent for many an aeon, and though those it touches wait with eager anticipation for its arrival, few bother to follow it on its elusive journey. I like to think that my favourite place has a sense of humour, with its different guises and appearances every time I visit. Once it showed itself through a leafy Michigan suburb, and on another occasion it materialised as a firework forest.
My favourite place is wherever the American Fall makes his temporary home. Allow me to personify the season; because in my mind he's a mischievous little boy; he steals the green from the trees at night and lowers the temperature by day. He can't hide his smell, however distracting the colour transformation outside might be. A fresh, wet scent wafts up through the earth and mingles with the perfume of slowly descending leaves (which look as though they are miniature fireworks, with sunset flushes exploding on the canvas of the leaf) and hits you as you wake. The breeze is a gentle one ' it whips around your legs like a familiar dog and whispers in your ear. With one playful hand, the wind drags you on, weary feet invigorated by the texture and sound of the celebrated leaves crunching beneath instantly lighter legs, only pausing so that you can admire the landscape its creator has made (he is nothing if not vain).
He came to me first when I was three years old, and I experienced it in the carefree innocence of those who can still count their age on their fingers. My first few years on Earth had been distinctly European ' and the seasons were slow to change, the disappointing autumn bringing forth a howling wind that hammered on the door like an ungrateful relative with terrible timing, and an unavoidable, overpowering stench of mud.
The American Fall does not compete with the European Autumn; he has its very own league, and feels completely at ease to stretch out across the vast sprawl between Maine and Florida, without a hint of rivalry between the states. In that magical third year of my life I realised that so much was made of the English Spring and Summer because the rest of the year would be busily spent trying to untangle the unsalvageable Autumn and Winter, which I will continue to confuse for as long as I live in Europe's dim ambience.
Perhaps it is better if Europe looks the other way when he gets going. With its bright orange pumpkin and apple cider fields, maple woodlands, July Fourth cocooned inside a single leaf and an intoxicating smell that you experience rather than smell; another climate's autumn does not even come close.
The American Fall is a passing friend. He visits annually, and I spent blissfully contented childhood years waiting for him by my bedroom window that to this day screams in protest if you open it too quickly. The year that I became an American, the Fall left sadly for the southern states without a proper explanation. I did not scream or cry for his immediate return, but fancied that whenever I saw a leaf with the Fourth of July cocooned within it, it was the American Fall saying goodbye.