I Think It's Frostration

My fondness for Autumn is tempered by my knowledge of what happens next, not because of anything Autumn, itself, has ever done to or for me. 

In New England, we pride ourselves on the 'leaf peeping' weekends where excursions travel throughout the region oohing and ahhing at the multiplicity of colors garbing the branches of the deciduous trees as their leaves die.

Sorry. That's what they do, hell, it's what we all do. I'm not planning on taking a dirt nap yet but I'll concede I don't have that color thing going on for me unless grey is the color you're talking about and the only part of me thinning is the hair covering my scalp. But in recent days, for just a moment, Wow! it has been beautiful.

Industry left New England in the first decade after the end of World War II. We didn't know it then, but those who owned factories that made things got tired of paying the folks who worked in them ein apfel und ei so they shifted everything South by 900 miles or so and only had to pay ein apfel.

Mills that had been in Massachusetts for generations were shuttered as their doppelgangers opened in one of the Carolinas and then a generation later, lather, rise, repeat as the new location became somewhere it takes you ten minutes to find on the map, all in the name of value to shareholders. The business of America is business; remember your receipt.

In Norwich, Connecticut, where I've lived for over three decades, there are tracts of land, monuments to Mammon, sprawling factories in many corners of the city that have lain fallow for half a century or more, slowly disintegrating, releasing toxins into the air and poisons into the earth so that like the salt Rome plowed into Carthage to kill it, nothing will grow. No neighborhood is immune.

Some have been resurrected while others still have a ways yet to go like the Capehart and the gun maker in the middle of downtown as well as the small ruins that ring the approaches to the city, reminders of what once was, once upon a time. 

But this time of year, in the early morning hours before dawn when stepping outside, the stars seem so bright and so near you can touch them, you remember there's no ground light to dissipate their glow or make them seem as far away as they really are. It's nearly Halloween and mornings can be colder than a witch's teat and you know which way the mercury is heading. Dress warmly and mind the shadows.
-bill kenny