Autumn is in the passing. Let her pass.
—
She asked me if this could last forever.
I told her not forever, but longer.
So we packed nothing more than we needed and drove down the globe.
Early in the mountains of New Hampshire the colors came, in rain droplets, in little splashes, overwhelmed by the oceans of green, speckled on the crests and in the troughs of the veins and waves of hard soil, punctuated by spines of rock itself. The best and most fleeting time of year had come at last.
The dog of August lazily wagged its tail across the first weeks of September but could not bar the tide from its steady advance. Cool evenings were chased away by chilly nights, and the summer sun by a jealous moon, stealing our day away. These shorter hours are ours, vibrant with bursts of vigorous life before being carried off to bed for a long winter’s sleep.
The yellows and oranges and bright red reds stayed in the mountains but crept down the hills, and we knew we must move to stay right where we were. South or down the mountains, eventually both, to stay bathed in the harvest palette. Slowly, we wound through Vermont and New York to the tired hills of Pennsylvania where a week kept us too long in one warm town. There the trees were left out in the night, and the October rains worked the leaves into a junkyard heap of muted rusts.
November bowed its head in shame and nodded us southward through the crags of West Virginia where grey patches of fallen ghosts shaded those who were to follow. We moved into the hills of North Carolina, but still could not take hold of our fall. Momentum carried us down into the flatlands. We stopped without resting, bound to leisure as we were, but bereft of a vehicle unworn by the advancing cold. We found an uneasy relaxation, a holiday of nerves. Each week saw us reaching out for what was beyond our reach and embracing the bracing emptiness of November mornings.
The highlands of Georgia tenuously held on to that which was wafting off the mountains to evaporate in the eternal warmth of the southern peninsula. We could not cross that final border, a boundary behind which our aim had vanished, our target in the lost fogs of a forsaken home.
A week of northward driving and northward stopping and northward lamenting found us bumping along the dirt and gravel road back to our cottage. At the bottom of the mountain wisps of snow waved across the narrow drive, but as we climbed, the wisps turned to drifts and slowed our exhaustion. We drove the final mile encouraged by the anticipation of a warmth known only as home. But when the fire was lit, bellows blown, and many logs burnt, she and I still shivered in each other’s arms.
Only upon our return did we realize that in our haste we packed our belonging and left her to sail off into a seasonless dream, a stranger in a stranger place, never again to know the comfort of our inhospitable mountain. We chased her away with the autumn we never had.