On the weekend, I breathed the burnt and quiet richness that is Fall in America each time I stepped outside. It was a solitary experience, but one akin to going home, or saying goodbye to an old friend. Each time the leaves begin to turn, I am amazed not by their color, but that they’re still hanging on. After all the storms. After the months of heat, days of wind, and hours of overwhelming stillness. I saw the same leaves sprouting on these branches six months ago, as I searched for a new home. Each new autumn, I am overcome by thoughts of who I was when these little scraps of life emerged from the dead land, or of what the world entailed when color re-introduced itself to the sticks and mud so many nights ago. These are the same leaves, I say, with wonder.
On Saturday, I ignored my responsibilities in order that I might worship the high altar of Football Almighty, which has few finer homes than South Bend, Indiana in October. When the Irish took the field against their greatest rival wearing the legendary green jerseys for the first time in years, I took pride in already knowing the significance of such an act. And before me, in the radio fuzz of a television struggling to hear the echoes of Old Notre Dame waking in the waves, I watched a story unfold that transcended sport or hype, as its players heroically wrote their parts in a classic drama. Two teams I am indifferent to left me near tears, not at joy or pain, but with wonder, for what anyone would acknowledge was a great game.
On Sunday, I picked up an ancient friend from the architecture school for noodles and words. Our conversation was a recitation of sentences we might have expected to hear in a lazily written movie, but not our own lives. Yet in our case it seemed appropriate and unforced, if difficult. For the first time in all these years, our fortune cookies combined for a wickedly coherent charge. Burnt bridges are hard to cross, hers read, but worth risking it all for a dream, mine concluded with a bewildering sense of augmented completion. As the conversation dwindled, and the weight of its topics brought us to a noiseless exhaustion, her small voice whispered, Oh life, as she turned with a bittersweet smile. Oh death, I said, with an absurd grin, and wonder.
These small stories, though apart, are for me the strands of a single twine. I am drawn and connected to each of the seasons. But this one, of them all, is mine. I was born to it, and I know each of its chords. In simple terms, the Fall is a story of death. But to those of us who know it well, it is rather the story of that which is somehow still living. It is the inaudible glory of what hasn’t fallen. The splendor of the life that still remains, as it always will. The sublime of a vast death survived, with sweet crisp color, and above all, wonder.