Season of Leaves

The first time I discovered my grandpa crying was on thanksgiving. He played it off with a meandering speech, You know…Northerners know somethin’ about trees. Fallin’ leaves always gettin’ us ready to grieve. That’s when it’s safe. Them branches hold it on the nights you can’t. At eight years old, I only knew to wrap my twiggy arms around his stump legs. The year’s first snow hit the next day, and I remember watching the maple in my parent’s front yard discard leaf after leaf, unwrapping its capable limbs and painting our white canvas yard in hues of honey, scarlet, apricot.

And maybe my grandpa is to blame for my cycle of emotions. Like clockwork, I cry at the year’s first frost. Sometimes I’ll cry the day before if I’m really shaken, like when October 2005 claimed my grandpa, dead on the toilet, a shitty heart attack, or when Sophie left me a few Septembers ago with a shirt soaked in her tears and second guesses. My cries look a lot like gutters toward the end of the season of leaves, gargling everything the trees cough up. All that deciduous refuse frothing at the pipe’s mouth, plugged tight save for a thin rainwater trickle from last night’s storm. It erodes the foliate dam little by little as the puddle becomes a tributary, becomes a river, becomes a gushing waterfall.

I suppose now I understand my grandpa was right, because I don’t remember crying all those years when I lived in that beach town where temperatures couldn’t drop below freezing. I never reached for a jacket. I mean…how could my depression surface where trees clutched their greens like fancy pearls, refusing to acknowledge loss? How could my depression surface in a place where my boots never touched discarded leaves coating streets like ski wax? How could my depression surface in a place where I watched my friends die via Facebook, their Zoom funerals, and no bare branches to hang my grief on?

So you see, it makes sense that I’m here tonight in Minnesota, parked outside my parents’ house in -7 degrees Fahrenheit with a frozen Master Lock on my U-Haul trailer and a new teaching job starting on Monday, watching the old maple in their front yard with one stubborn brown leaf waving like a flag of surrender. It makes sense that this stubborn leaf would hang on long enough for me to watch it detach and fall, riding waves of frigid gusts only to land on my windshield. And it makes sense that I produce a sob so loud it could change the direction of a river’s current, the gutters of my tear ducts finally loose from years down south.