Serendipity. I sensed a speculative something in the horizon, with which from the blackish sky backdrop looked like the 11th plague of Egypt. Gazing up toward the murky heavens, they portrayed the heavy dust particles that were about to pound an unarmed enemy. I looked at them intently and realized that they were in fact as yellow as the three-quarter-shaped moon that shone that magical Friday night.

I am referring to the leaves of trees blown heavily by the western wind. On my way to the office for a late night of work, I stared at the heavens to watch these pseudo imago butterflies fluttering their spiritless, no-cuticle wings in pure ataraxia. While few enjoyed the slow descent to a temporary kibbutz, others contented themselves with a steady-state, non-flitting aerodynamic lifts. Like butterflies, leaves falling made my eyes narrow with a half-stunned, half-euphoric, semilunar, open-lipped semblance. At one point I stopped and wondered at this wonderful site to behold that nobody around even cared a fig.

Fall has started to manifest its grandeur in every whisk of the breeze and in the clutter of leaves on ground, enough for a lick and a promise. Last year I wrote how the leaves fell on a couple spending time under the shade of a pale green tree; and how it sprinkled the man’s kiss attempts and witnessed the girl’s giggles of anticipation. Today, the leaves inspired me not just to write about them again but opened my eyes to few realizations.

Loving each colorful detail of fall, oddments of the past couple of weeks flickered at the environs of my eyelids. I thought at how I missed to appreciate life in this city of Brookings: those little pinches of beauty that I used to love about the place (squirrels, crickets, flower gardens, halva, jackrabbits, tacos, SDSU ice cream, vast fields and gracious people), of which I promised myself to only see, feel, taste, experience. It was a realization that happened when I was on the verge of breaking loose from an experience that only the infuriated ego of an antagonistic contraband in a totalitarian society could appreciate. Even George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” would have paled in comparison with my blog entry about Brookings that carried the anger of The Bride, a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo of Kill Bill and was supposed to be posted last week had my friends not interfered and advised me to cancel its posting. Their efforts were greatly appreciated. Had I pursued the posting, I would have wallowed in dire regrets.

Now, having schooled my thoughts into full comprehension of the likely precipitates of my writings and the touch they may have to my readers, I slithered into my old praxis again. The self who wrote the feel-good posts “Fuchsia in South Dakota,” “Falling for a brown-haired American girl at The Union” and the likes, would be evident again. Of course, the squirrels of Brookings and the leaves, thanks to them, would play their roles once more as they proved to be efficient means of self-approbation.

Please allow me to sweet-talk myself that, as a blogger, I am an unbiased, sometimes fruity individual with appetite for absurd beauty, mantic attitude, perverted wit, and cockamamie details. It is strange though that I haven’t killed anyone yet (laugh out loud). Perhaps because I don’t think about violent stuff on people in those moments of unfriendly howls of vehemence, in those times when my opinions differ from the zeitgeist. Rather, I think of my pen, of survival and all the nice details there is to life in Brookings and the society in general. Perhaps because there is more to life than entertaining anger. Perhaps because there are more colors to appreciate if I just have to look around. Perhaps because I simply do not want to miss the small wonders in living whenever I am transformed into a new self.

From now on, I would be whisking the colors and the sapid taste of Brookings while I stare at the butterflies, I mean the leaves!

[note: This piece has already appeared in my Collegian column]