3. leaves.

my favorite time of the year is autumn. i've always had a hard time picking a favorite season, though. in winter, i love bundling up in warmth and counting dow the days until Christmas and watching snow fall. in spring, i live for dresses and flowers and driving with my windows down. in summer, i like the sunshine and country music and random adventures (summer tends to hold many of those). but when fall comes around, i am one unthinkably happy girl. autumn, by my definition, is the time of the year when i fall in love with clothes, i constantly wear my favorite pairs of boots, i no longer have to worry about my hair frizzing up and risking looking as if i were freshly electrocuted, stores sell caramel apple suckers, i turn a year older on the 4th day of october, and the colors outside are gorgeous. it's beautiful and mesmerizing and i will never be too old to jump in a pile of leaves.

leaves are wonderful. they have a distinct smell that causes me to want to go carve a pumpkin and drink apple cider. taking a walk is accompanied by a natural soundtrack of crunchy leaves shifting beneath your feet, a song only heard during the season of fall. i love that sound.

fall means going back to school. i've always given in to the back-to-school hype that is annually instigated by old navy commercials and buying new pens. (i love paper-mate uniball pens. they're the best out there.) ironically, when school has started and i'm sitting in class viewing a syllabus that is still warm from the printer, the long list of assignments in my near future suddenly kills the back-to-school happy bug.

but then i leave class and shuffle my (super cute) boots through the piles of leaves in my path. and nothing beats that. i love that something so simple and natural can provide me with a smile. leaves. happiness.

people always leave.
seasons always change.
leaves always fall.

it's true. right when we think that we have friendships and relationships that are like oxygen for our every day lives, people leave. why does this always happen? prepare yourself for a really, super bad analogy.

i am a tree. every experience i absorb, each person in my life, all of the mistakes i want to take back are my leaves. all of these leaves grow and eventually must fall as seasons change. sometimes we want to hold on to this stuff because of the importance and beauty it provides us with, but you can't keep a leaf from falling. it has to happen. it always will happen and it is not in our control.

the thing about fallen leaves is that they still bring a smile to my face after they've fallen. i get to walk through them and remember where they grew and where they once had been brought to life. they crunch beneath my boots and i smile. i smile because of lessons learned. i smile because they've cleared room for new leaves to grow. i smile because life is so unpredictably beautiful, yet we will always know that seasons change.

i just really like leaves.

live justly, love mercy, walk humbly...i'm seeing who i am, God.