Birds flying back to their cozy little nests, orange and golden sunsets, lush green lawns with delicately standing trees..which remind me of elegant dancers striking a pose, small winding roads with huge, imposing, age old trees...Welcome to the Queen City, Charlotte. Those views are some of the reasons I've come to love a drive around the locality where we live. It's been a beautiful summer here...and fall is slowly changing the city's myriad hues. I can't wait to go on a "fall drive" around the Smoky mountains! Just getting drenched in the midst of a yellow and orange drizzle of leaves, trying in vain to capture the joy of it all on a camera :-)....isn't it strange that every year we have a spring, summer, fall and winter...and yet the beauty is always fresh and new every year! Like a new masterpiece on a fresh canvas.

 

All this takes me back to Bangalore of the yester years...long walks along the parks on "Nanda road", sometimes with friends, sometimes with my grandpa (with his Nehru cap :) on our way to a relative's place on a bright sunday morning, sometimes the after-dinner walks with my mom (when Bangalore used to be a safe place at night)...and ofcourse the solitary walks. Keeping track of whether the gulmohars and copper pods were late blossoming that summer, or whether there were fewer lavender trees in the park in the winter. Enjoying the fragrance of "road malli" as we used to call it - that was the monsoon special bloom. Ofcourse, when we were at a certain 'silly' age, preserving some flower petals and leaves( yes, leaves!!) in between the leaves of a book used to be a passion. I even remember keeping them in my music book..they would all fall out when I opened the book, but I would stubbornly put them all back after the class. Such stupidity HAS to be chronicled somewhere!! Then, the religious yearly/ half-yearly trips to the Lalbagh flower show with the whole family - I'm sure the promise of icecreams and the hot n spicy 'butta' whetted my enthusiasm more than the pretty flowers. Hmm...I could go on and on, but that's not the purpose of this post.

 

 

Wordsworth said it all.