It is autumn here in the Blue Mountains in Australia. The world has been getting steadily colder for weeks, the sun has retreated in the sky, and leaves are falling to the ground in great numbers. It is both beautiful and melancholy, and it instills a form of sun-worship deep inside me that I don't think I will ever lose - even though I grew up as a child of the tropics. I don't like knowing there are still three bleak months of winter to come, so I focus on the small, visual beauties of autumn in the here and now . Back in high school, I remember we were given an English Lit assignment of writing a poem about autumn. We never did enough of the creative writing, which was my favourite thing (although I used to anticipate it so much, the joy in the actual writing and end result never lived up to expectation). For the autumn poem, I can't remember what I wrote (thank goodness!) except that I tried to make it rhyme. I tried to use all the right imagery borrowed from the...