Fall Downtown

I always smell it coming.  The earth changes in autumn.  It’s not just the smell of the decaying leaves, but the dirt smells like it’s dying too.  The cool winds bring the smell of a melancholy farewell to summer.  It is a season for deep souls to wake up.  It wakes mine up, every year.  

Some people head north to see the fall colors.  But I think my favorite fall colors to see are in the city. I love the gathering leaves on the sidewalks. I love to see the ivy on the old stone buildings turning ruby red.

I love the fall jackets and the city folk who wear them.  I like the colored trees in the parks and in front of the Minnesota Art Institute.

My favorite though, are the fallen leaves on the sidewalks and streets. I love when the early setting sun hits them just right and I love to watch them come to life in a cool wind. 

I love tucking my blowing hair behind my ear as the fallen downtown leaves float around me.
 

Every season has its nostalgia but there’s something about autumn that feels transporting.  Sure snow can remind me of my childhood, and so can watermelon in the summer.  But fall does something very different and more profound.  Every time I rake the leaves for the kiddos I nanny for and smell that magical smell of dead leaves, I feel transported. When I stand out in the autumn air all memories of my life start to feel like strange good dreams, pieces of something that does not exist anymore but somehow stay with me.  

 Fall entombs comfort and gradually releases it bit by bit as the trees die around me, as the air gets colder, as the days lose their length.  I can still smell and taste my mom’s chicken soup and those soft dinner rolls on a school night.  I’d be playing with my best friend Tiffany out in the yard until it got dark, and I could smell it cooking from outside.  Dying leaves, chicken soup, dying earth.  Comfort.  I remember going to a pumpkin patch with Tiffany and her church when we were about eight or nine.  We sang church songs all the way there and all the way back.  The sky was so blue and the pumpkins so orange and I will never forget how in love with the colors I was, how comforting the contrast was, how aesthetically pleasing autumn culture was to my soul.  And then there’s the mystical part of fall, the deep dark melancholy that when it sweeps over me on a cold, overcast windy evening I can feel spirits in the air.  I can see the goodness of my childhood and also feel the bitter grief of losing it.  The trees are black in the darkening gray sky and the grass has lost its luster, all the while the red and yellow leaves on the ground show bright. 

I grew up in the suburbs, a quaint little neighborhood known as Lamont Circle.  The maples in our front yard were for climbing.  Their leaves for building.  We not only built piles to jump in but we also designed leaf mazes, a tradition that began with my older brothers.  We would play cops and robbers through the maze and to this day I can still feel the adrenaline rush of being chased by a “cop”.  We’d play until it got dark and our mothers would call out the windows to beckon us home for dinner. 

When I was still little enough for pretending I used my brothers’ hockey sticks as horses.  My best friend and I would each get one, mount it and ride away to faraway lands that are still very real in my mind.  When I smell the dying leaves and the dying earth, I remember a backyard full of magic and haunting spirits of make-believe. 

I now walk the streets of Minneapolis with the dry leaves beneath my feet signaling my senses and wakening the deepest parts of my person.  I fall into the smells, into the comfort and I fall into my memories and come alive as everything around me is dying beautifully and so colorfully and so aesthetically pleasing.  Home.  Fall is home.