It is the time of moody records and blankets, and nearly the time of candles. Though there’s late afternoon sun it doesn’t have the same warmth and it’s wet, the ground smells, the earth sighs: and we are all holding on, on this amusement park ride about to tilt over and drop…

Indoors the light takes on new angles and charms. Three drunk fruit flies in my beer, almost enough to make a constellation. And the light makes it look like a potion, how it glows as the sun dips low.

It’s the time of year I was born, deep fall, and I feel an odd strength in this slow collapse. There is the turn inward to restore: dead-head me, cut me back, clear away the ground cover. I gathered up the hoses and the yard tools, stuffed them in the shed, found a headless rabbit the cat killed, tossed it in the bushes by the neighbors’, refilled the hot tub: the size of the wolf spider beneath the lid and how fast it disappeared, like a hand.

And around the corner, all the rain and pools to fill the streets: waking to the sound of the heater, leaving the house for work in the dark. On the first bus of the day with the heat on too high, shifting from side to side with our coffees, steadying myself at my stop, reemerging on the street to cross…the smell of fall, the look of it in the sky, the light against the gray, the sense it could rain or just has.

Categories: Memoir, prose

Tags: autumn poetry, journal writing, pacific northwest, Seattle, short form, Slowdive, William Pearse writer