LIFE AS IT IS

I look out the window and what I see is a stark contrast to what I saw two months ago. My little garden is perishing; my little backyard is strewn with brown, amber, and butterscotch-coloured fallen leaves from nearby maple, sycamore, oak, and birch. The buzzing bees, hummingbirds, goldfinches, doves, and blue jays are all gone. The season has arrived.   I smell the fragrance of fall in the air. The morning air is crisp, the leaves are turning, and the temperatures are dipping. The quilts are out, the comforters are in. Sweaters, jackets, and scarves have been pulled out of the closet in preparation for the cooler days ahead. While the aforementioned things are easier to adjust to, it is my garden and its changing appearance that asks me of my patience, for it is going to be a long wait before my garden dresses up in a myriad of colours afresh.  My vegetable plants have nearly stopped producing. The Italian eggplant is still bearing blossoms, but which dry out and drop to the ground,

This is the season for the leaves to turn gold, scarlet, caramel and crimson. The chlorophyll breaks down in silence and gives way to the majestic fall colours that leave us in awe of the season. However, this autumn is different from all the other autumns I lived. There is a tinge of melancholy in every flaming orange, fiery red or warm yellow leaf. Last autumn, did we have the faintest idea what the next autumn might look like for us? Here in the US, COVID-19 has claimed more than 200,000 lives. As America braces for a likely second wave of the coronavirus, I see death, disease and despair in every yellowed leaf of maple, oak and sycamore.  I look forward to the kaleidoscope of colours autumn offers every year, but this year, I cannot rejoice in the bounties of nature. I am just not in the right state of mind. Instead, wherever I look, I perceive pain, loss and malady. When I call up family back home in Dhaka, I hear the news of another person falling ill to COVID-19. This has been a

Morning view from living room window - fall leaves falling like rain. 

Summer crawls into autumn, a slow but poised walk into a natural world different not solely in terms of weather. Mother Nature lays out the differences the season brings about in the colours of the sky, leaves, flowers, and even in the coats of wild birds and animals. Summer evenings change to autumnal nights. The sun sets early, so you can no longer take a walk in the park at 7 o'clock in the evening. In autumn, by that hour of the day, the western sky begins to clothe in indigo. A curtain begins to draw on the world. The outside temperatures also start to dip rather quickly. And the bedroom windows, which you kept open on warm July evenings, need to be shut tight. You wish you could squeeze more hours into the day, but because that cannot be done, you try to spend evenings at home, reading or listening to music over a cup of steaming caffeinated drink. On a cosy autumn evening, you tell yourself that life is not too bad, even though days would soon be all gusty and slushy

A gold maple leaf parted with its mother and glided down in a dancing motion to join its brethren on the ground; they all congregated at the base of their mother's trunk, as if waiting for something big and important to unravel.  The desiccated leaves skirted around their mother, forming a yellow-brown crunchy blanket that rustled every time the wind blew. An unruly gust would sometimes, however, disrupt this sombre congregation. The gust would send them in disarray. And when it did, the leaves rolled all over the grass, hitting stones, trunks of other trees, cars and even young joggers' running shoes.  The Daily Star link On those occasions, the shrivelled leaves reminisced about the days when they were young, green and bursting with vigour -- the time when they lived close to the boundless sky, not on the soggy ground of autumn.     The mother maple, which was green and strong even a month ago, was fading and growing frail. She seemed to be getting old faster than s