the fall light is so different, sneaks up on me each year. golden and dark, bright decay. a specific texture or register. this season feels accelerated—a rushing into the stillest time of year. nightfall somehow more present.
summer is behind us, or further in front of us, again. this week the new york times published an article about how the bay area’s summer/signature fog might be disappearing because of rising temperatures. i’m someone who hates to be cold, shivered and griped through these frigid summers many times. and this news was sobering. it was not surprising and it hurt.
having spent the first five years of my existence in the sunset, a notoriously foggy neighborhood in san francisco, coming to earth meant coming into fog. the rolling in and rolling out. the oldest (or youngest?) part of me was shaped by fog.
summer gives way to fall. fog gives way to sunshine. there’s so much sunshine.
earlier this summer i was on a night time walk, and saw orange leaves beneath the street lamp. a person was sitting on the corner smoking a cigarette and i lamented to them that it seemed so early in the year for the leaves to be orange. he said i’ve been living in brooklyn for 20 years, he said the leaves change at different times every year.
he saw my distress, however mild, and offered reassurance. the encounter was sweet, neighborly.
there is no reassuring, really. there is drastic change and there is grief in my chest.
what might be more sinister than orange leaves in august, or a fogless san francisco, is the way we keep offering ourselves and each other reassurance. the way we keep turning away.
“And the seasons know exactly when to change”1
and what if we might, too.
As, Stevie Wonder ↩