It’s Fall Again
Here, the leaves are barely starting to turn, but I’m wearing burnt orange and my little cream pumpkin earrings. I’m thinking of my Vans in the closet and of no need to keep up a pedicure. I’m thinking of cozy clothes and big blankets and a fire in the fireplace.
The south is slow on fall, and then suddenly it’s glorious. I love driving the back roads of my county in fall, when you skirt a gravel road and out of nowhere there’s this drop-off with a breathtaking view of farmland stretching for miles under the most magnificent sky. I wonder why I don’t drive this way every day, no matter where I’m going.
We take a hayride in the fall, which means that my dad puts some hay in the back of his truck, and we pile on top of it, covered in coats and blankets and hats. My dad asks my grandmother if she wants to come too, to sit up front with him, and she says, “What would I want to do that for?” but when we stop at her door, she’s ready and has her purse, and she climbs gingerly into the cab. Inside, the two of them can tell all the stories they want about who used to live where and how they are all related to us, the stories I have heard all my life and never remember.
Back at my parents’ house, my mom hands out bowls of chili, and I poke hot dogs onto the ends of skewers for my kids to roast in the fire my dad and his friend are cultivating outside. Sometimes we can hear the coyotes in the woods, but I don’t worry about them with my dad’s old dog wandering around the edges of the light. My kids want their hot dogs barely hot, and they disappear back inside to the bowls of chips and the Halloween decorations that thrill my son. My sister and I stay out longer, trying to make ours charred, watching the stars scattered across the inky sky above. Later I burn my marshmallows and stuff the sticky sweet fried sugar into my mouth without bothering to make s’mores. I find the bag of marshmallows and put two more on the end of my skewer and take turns watching the sky and the fire. I’m wearing my old college sweatshirt, and when I come inside, I can still smell the woodsmoke clinging to it.
These are the days, everyone says, and I see the absolute loveliness in these moments, in the memories we are creating, that maybe my kids will remember forever. Sometimes I feel like I fell into this life, like a series of other people’s choices led me to where I am today. There’s some truth in that. No one of us is in charge of all of our lives. But I also know that I did have my hand in choosing, that even when I wanted to escape this place and its people, I’m the one who finally looked around and decided that even with all its faults, there’s no better place than here.