Cold weather and medicine

Maybe I've just overdosed on cough syrup, but the sky seems extraordinarily blue today, the sun extraordinarily bright, the air extraordinarily clean. I either got lost or distracted (really, a little of both) on my way to campus, wandered along rustling sidewalks (or rather, sidewalks lined with rustling trees, I really have taken in too much, feel mildly detached, observant, like I'm floating over myself rather than in my body)(or like I'm watching me as a character in a movie or a play, sometimes it's interesting to imagine that, to script lines then absolve yourself of any responsibility for their utterance) and collected a tremendous variety of leaves -- pale, delicate maple, dark almost burnt-looking oak, old bronzed something-or-other with a small tidy hole in it (think very-hungry caterpillar).

It's autumn. The day should be spent walking a dog, raking up leaves, stacking wood, baking apple pie, oh a thousand things other than aimlessly roaming the streets of Manhattan Kansas desperate to be outside to be happy to find some sort of meaning in this place.

It is not an appropriate day for purpleness. Today is washed in hues of gold amber red brown light, not the light of Vermeer or Turner, but a light of poignancy that I've never seen painted, think perhaps shouldn't ever be painted, described only in poetry, in leaves, in the smell of sunshine against a blue sky.