Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Original Fiction FDK: Scrooge or Fall Foliage Lover? (1/1)

This one is a bit of an experiment. Please let me know if it succeeded.

Incidentally, I was searching for a better first word for the title. I found the perfect one, but decided that it was too obscure to use: A chrysophile (or a chrysophilist) is a person who loves gold.

While I read that my head was doing strange things. Part of me imagined Gollum from Lord of the Rings, the other part was humming the song "Sycamore Leaves" by a-ha. So, I guess thank you for both giving me the creeps and a pleasant feeling. I'd definitely go for foliage lover.

I'll admit that the song is also a little creepy, but I like it anyway. It's definitely a good thing when you can turn your head off and let the words flow past you, not trying to get what they're saying.

You definitely grokked what I was attempting with this piece, although I had been hoping that the "fall foliage lover" interpretation would be more joyous and less creepy.

The idea for this experiment came when I was admiring the autumn leaves. The colours here were unusually bright this year, and at their peak all the trees I could see in the forest abutting my back yard were a blaze of gold. I was wishing that they would stay in such a magnificent state for more than a few days, and simply reveling in their glory. I realized that with a bit of tweaking of the wording, the positive thoughts I was having could equally be coming from a miserable miser looking at the precious metal.

It actually proved harder than I had anticipated to come up with something that could be read as either uplifting or misery-inducing. I was trying to come up with a verbal equivalent of one of the figure-ground optical illusions such as the one with the faces and the vase.

Thank you so much for leaving feedback again. I especially appreciate it for this particular piece, since your feedback helped reassure me that I was at least somewhat able to pull off the tightrope walk I was attempting.

Joy,
Lynn

Oh, I think you got that wrong. I love the fall and I also like the song, despite it's strange text. So the interpretation of the fall lover was positive, don't worry about that.

And if I knew any fall songs in English with less creepy texts, I would certainly have hummed them. But there is a long way, phonetically from fall to Herbst and from foliage to Blätter. So it's just difficult to associate

Hi Bakasi,

Thanks for the reassurance. And now that you mention it, I don't think I know any other songs extolling the changing leaves, either. Such a pity.

Actually, I do know one song that has a verse about the fall: The Four Seasons by Brian Pearson. (This is not Vivaldi's Four Seasons, which I am not counting since that lacks lyrics.)

Joy,
Lynn