As winter nears, the autumn projects its scattered polychromy in bouts of orange, red, and yellow among the trees: the leaves grow heavy with infusions of crimson and soft gold, the trees droop with submission to the upcoming season. There is something in these fierce, melancholy, colors that subdues the eye and makes the human heart aspire for what was.
And what was? A wise man might say: wars, ages, all of human history, toils of old. A fool might say: nothing ever was. Having had my share in both wisdom and folly, I cannot tell one from another.
Life once was. Held surely in the eyes of the young and old, proclaimed in the wind, raised on colored banners, set forth into the waiting day. But now the ground, stained by the changing season, bears the embrace of fallen leaves.
Fall returns to summer, but we can never return to a time before COVID-19. We might see red in the trailing of our steps, the shapes of orange leaves, the yellows that pattern where our heels touch the earth. And beneath these leaves that outfit the autumn are the graves of the dead and the many. Life once was: a million memories, a million smiles, a million faded likenesses.
Winter is cold, summer is sweet. Spring is lost before the eye in unbelief. But life is something else entirely in autumn’s disquiet breeze.