The Weight of Autumn By Morgan Wessling

Like a whisper spoken to the leaves, autumn arrives. Early in the morning, the fog clings to the trees and pulls smoky fingers over the river as it moves through the hollow spaces of a little town. The smoke and soil from the summer flames are now ghosts, lingering in the air which carries their scent. It is a season suspended between life and decay, holding its breath in a delicate balance. 

In the center of the town is a tall, old maple tree. Its branches are inscribed with the stories of generations who sought its shade. Its leaves become amber, scarlet, and gold in the fall, resembling old parchment and fire. They drift to the ground like fragile pieces of time caught in the wind. We danced through them as kids, but now that we’re standing there, they appear to be relics of a past that is fading. 

The town has a long-standing tradition that says you will be lucky for the remainder of the season if you capture the first leaf in the air. Both tired adults and excited children perform this ritual. However, as you age, it turns into more of a test—a silent hope that perhaps luck would hold out a bit longer this time. 

Yet, autumn is not just a season about endings. Every leaf that falls brings back memories of families wrapped in old flannel jackets, of hands clasped together during cool nighttime strolls, and of laughter mixed with the aroma of street vendors’ cinnamon. The harvest moon watches over the town in all its fading splendor, heavy with unspoken longing. 

There is another weight to autumn, one not easily seen but deeply felt. There is a sense of melancholy in the season’s shadowed corners—a realization of change that seems irreversible. It is the way dusk seems to creep in a bit sooner every night, as if it were invading daylight—not cruelly, but simply by necessity. The light fades quietly, as though it understands that this is also a part of the cycle. 

The townspeople hold onto an old belief that during this season, the world grows thinner, as if the line separating life and death starts to unravel. That thought had a certain charm when I was younger, but today it seems like an unspoken reality. On late October evenings, you can almost feel it—the way memories cling to the air like woodsmoke, how ghosts of the past stroll by you but are never visible. 

Like the roots of that on a maple tree, stories wind their way through the streets of a tiny town like this one. Every Thanksgiving, you hear about the elderly schoolteacher who lost her spouse in a long-ago war but still has an extra spot at her dining table. Or the man who worked on the family farm all his life and now sits at the window, watching the fields grow dreary and brown while he waits for a son who never returns. Like the seasons themselves, these tales are the town’s legacy, the burden of lives spent in slow loops. 

And so, autumn is not just a season of dying here; it is a season for reflection, for transitions, and of understanding that everything changes. Every leaf that strikes the ground nearly sounds like a small sigh, and the wind is full of whispers of missed opportunities and unfulfilled expectations. 

You catch a leaf in midair while standing beneath that massive maple tree. It feels as though time itself has pressed on its fragile and brittle edges as you hold it in your palm. You no longer consider luck; luck is reserved for the optimistic, for those who assume that there is still room for negotiation in the world. Rather, you consider the leaf as both a conclusion and a beginning, since it has lived its life on the tree and now becomes a part of something bigger, something that survives, by joining the ground. 

The world turns with or without us, and autumn serves as a reminder of that. This time of year teaches you to let go, to cherish moments even more than memories. It invites you to trust that fresh starts are already etched in the roots, to embrace ends as they occur, and to find beauty in the transitions. 

You release the leaf from your grasp as you turn to leave the tree. You watch it join the others, knowing it is just one of many, yet understanding that, like every memory, it is its own small universe—a piece of something greater. The wind stirs and the light fades, you realize that fall is about what we choose to remember in the coming seasons, not about what we have lost.