The morning after the very first frost in the year, every mulberry tree in the city starts to drop its leaves at precisely the same time, same hour, maybe even same minute. This looks somewhat like rain, a rain of leaves ranging from green to yellow to saffron to purpley-gold, producing a carpet of leaves in hundreds, maybe even thousands, of houses across the 505 area. It doesn’t sound quite like normal rain, more like the rustling of tissue paper. That day it was freezing. literally, and I had to take out my peacoat for the first time that year. When we stopped at Vera’s, I looked at the ground and saw that those green leaves were frozen, covered in a fine fuzzy layer of frost.
It’s starting to feel like winter now. It’s snowed only once, a sad, dirty little snow that floated down from crumpled paper clouds. None of it stuck, of course, and it only lasted a few minutes. It probably won’t snow more. It mostly just windy now, and my feet are cold. The cottonwoods have gone from emerald to chartreuse to topaz to dusty brown, and now they litter the ground, blowing in the wind, sounding like an old man’s wheezing rattling lungs.
Soon all those leaves will be gone, blown away to somewhere else, and instead of leaves we’ll have garish rainbow lights scattered everywhere, and woodsmoke in the air. I don’t think I’ll ever decide if I like that smell or not.
All this just makes me think about change, how every year I get closer and closer to having to be on my own, which terrifies me. But maybe if I ever move away I’ll get to live in a place with real snow, inches and inches of it. For now though, I’ll just stay in this beige boring brownness, waiting for the time when I can escape to snowy Colorado and walk the frozen slippery streets and let the cold sting my nose and permeate my boots.
My friend hates fall. Everything’s dying, she says. It’s depressing. But it’s beautiful, I’ll say, gesturing to the forest of golden trees in front of me. Just taste the air, soak in the sunset’s light, feel the crunching grass beneath your feet when the first frost comes. It’s beautiful, but I guess she’s right. It’s a melancholy and short-lived beauty. The skies won’t always be this pretty at dawn and dusk, and the trees will turn brown and die. But for me autumn is the season of promises. While every tree and plant and animal dies and moves on, it’s a splendid and glorious death. They go out fighting, struggling for one last week, day, hour, even minute before it’s time to fly away in a V-formation or drop that last leaf from the branch. But fall is that reminder that it will all happen again, next year. The beauty will grow back, and then die, and then come back again. It will never end.
That is why I will always love the first frost.