Dear Fall

A desperate letter of need.

Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash

Dear Fall,

I’ve searched for you here in the south, but you’ve been a ghost, disappearing before I can be sure you exist.

A week back, I thought I caught your scent like a tracker smells game, or game smells a tracker. You reeked of the sweet side of rotten, dead-like, but it made me feel alive. You were musky, like a father’s cologne, and smoky like a campfire. But the excitement of those smells didn’t last long enough for me to know in my bones that it was you.

I could have sworn I saw you tucked back in my hollow like a shadow. You were a split-second flash of sun-beam-yellow fifty feet up in a black oak tree. You were dry, fallen leaves on my back porch five minutes after I swept it off. And you were a five-second cool breeze, randomly kicking up on an otherwise sticky, late September afternoon.

It’s October now. You should be here, even in Tennessee. But you are elusive.

You hide behind a dry summer with a heat index keeping chlorophyll in the veins and the abscission layer forming too early, dropping you to the ground in a crackling brown that blends in with the dirt.

I need you to be more than that. I need you to explode in an inferno of color. I need you to mandate a flannel jacket and a thin-knit hat. I need you to smell of hot smoke, hay bales, and candy corn. I need you to spook me like an old cemetery or grinning goblins in a doorway. I don’t want to pressure you, but I need you to conjure Halloween memories forty-five years gone. I need you to slap me across the face with a blast of chilly night air, like a wintergreen mint. I need you to be my childhood.

You are a hide-and-seek champion below the Mason-Dixon line but easy to spot standing above it. I saw you last in Maine.

You were naked and obvious, flaunting yourself in the canopies of red maple and butternut trees lining the Kennebec River.

In the north, you are not shy or subtle in your shadows. Instead, you throw chevron shapes across the quilted ground. You parade yourself down a small-town main street as scarecrows, witches, and pre-Thanksgiving Indian corn. You are pumpkins on flatbeds and jack-o’-lanterns on porches. You are dark brown ale and Allagash White spilling over the rims of Oktoberfest mugs. You are cold trout streams and old covered bridges with trusses and roofs dating back to the 1800s, still protecting travelers. For one weekend anyway, you are everything I need you to be.

Photo by L A N D R Y W I T T on Unsplash

I waved at you from seat 22 A, flying out of Logan International, and watched as you disappeared behind the silver wing. I felt sorry to leave you behind but eager to greet you again on your arrival south.

So when you are ready, and I hope that it is soon, hop a ride on the feathers of a gray goose. Rise to the jet stream on a puff of campfire smoke or in the yip of a coyote’s call. Arrive as the vapor I expel on that first cold night.

I’ll know you’re here when I can see my breath.

Fall, I don’t care how you get here. Just get here!

Yours truly,

The spirit of a ten-year-old boy.

---

I would love to hear what you thought about this essay and if it brought any personal memories or stories to mind. Please feel free to leave a comment. I’ll answer all of them. I would love to strike up a conversation about this piece and your thoughts. Please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend. Thank you. - Mark