A red car points up the hill like a lacquered nail. “Zest” proclaims its license plate, a commentary on the autumn landscape.
Were there a volume knob for color, it would be cranked high. Green leaves haloed by yellow or already fully ablaze reach from dark boughs. Tongues of orange fire lick the asphalt and gravel paths. As I walk, I extend my own branches and turn my palms upward, ready, with them, to ignite. A row of maples flames but is not consumed. God’s voice could rumble from their scarlet flicker, but instead I hear only the shh shh shh of scuffed leaves.
Within the silvery green and pink of a frost-touched hydrangea bobs a single blue sphere of blossoms. Twice now I’ve seen this—one lone holdout unmarked by autumn—like a treasured only child encircled by aging aunties. The oversized purple thistles I admired months ago have browned and wizened. Wild seed beards erupt from their crenellations and drop to the soil beneath. Only a bed of zinnias still looks package perfect—pink, orange, and ruby in its ravaged garden.
On the bowl of the reservoir, a blushing row of apple trees is losing its leaves. The steady north wind has blown the fallen up the slope behind, where they rest like a reflection mirrored on water—a line of orange orbs above and below.
The woods vibrate with this last cry of leaf and stem. Every bush, every stalk of grass strains to tell its story. I hear their wild cacophony, echoing the rippling arrows of geese passing above: “I am here. I am here.” With each passing Fall, my urge to shout my own story intensifies. Like the trees, I can feel myself beginning to smolder, green reddening against wrinkling bark. I want an audience for my final glory. I want to stick in someone’s mind like an ember, later to flare into poetry or ecstatic prose. Even the pumpkins clamor, mouths open to the wind.
All is zest, matter itself incandescent. Even inside, even in the dark, I feel it, and regret to miss a moment of the season’s closing.
