this year

While I was gone for the summer, the street running through campus had been paved, partially, just enough to keep tires from sticking in ruts. The cars were going faster than I remembered, and I waited for two green-light cycles before working my way out to the solid yellow lines. I paused between the two stripes. A bus passed, a hybrid, its cord dangling like the stub of a tail bitten off in a fight. I was surprised to swallow exhaust. I didn't notice a difference in taste between the bus and the Suburban that followed it. I did notice a leaf, drifting in that classical, whirling way that leaves have. If it weren't for the parking garage, sun rays would have split between clouds and surrounded the leaf, made it glow. It would have been a movie.

The leaf was brown, and I realized that I was disappointed. For the first year, I noticed the first leaf. I acknowledged this leaf's death as the beginning of a global shift. I traced back through Falls, through the reds and piles of orange and scent of them burning, then the marshmallows burning over them. But this leaf was brown. Instead of spice and hot tea and candles, when the leaf landed in the muddy patch of dead grass, I thought of the marshy piles that slouch in their own weight. I thought of wading through it as it lines the curb in front of our house, the stench that burns and melts my eyelashes when my jump doesn't quite clear it.