Galena House Publishing.Resemblance.
what autumn remembers
Fall has never felt new to me. That may be the first thing. It arrives every year dressed differently, but I recognize it before I understand why. A certain yellow in the trees. The brown underneath it. The first rust color against a field. Light going flatter in the afternoon. The woods beginning to show more of themselves. And suddenly I am not only where I am. I am also somewhere else.
Maley Road. Georgia. A house. A yard. My stepmother decorating. That is a fact. When I think of fall, I think of her. Not philosophically. I do not need to improve it. She decorated. And apparently some part of me kept the evidence. Years later, I can be thousands of feet higher, nowhere near that road, and one good October tree will open the whole file. There she is. There is the road. There are the fields. There are the woods running alongside them. There is that particular Georgia texture that never looked dramatic enough to become scenery while I was living inside it. Pine. Red dirt. Grass going dull. Leaves beginning to collect at the edges of things. A field changing color by degrees. Nothing announcing itself. And then one afternoon you look again and the whole place has become October.
I think memory works like that too. Not all at once. By color. By texture. By resemblance. I can forget an entire year and remember the exact quality of light on one road. That seems unfair. But memory has never shown much interest in fairness. It keeps what it likes. I have spent a large part of my life trying to improve that system. Naturally. Write it down. Take the photograph. Remember who was standing where. Keep the letter. Save the recipe. Keep the version. There is a kind of person who trusts memory. I am not that person. I believe in supporting documentation.
But autumn does something to me that documentation cannot. It returns a whole feeling before I have named the source. A tree turns. Something in me turns with it. And for a second, thirty-one does not replace ten. Colorado does not replace Georgia. The man does not replace the boy. They resemble each other. That is different.
I have been thinking a lot about resemblance lately. The word is more generous than sameness. Sameness is impossible. Resemblance allows a thing to change and still be recognized. A son resembles his mother without becoming her. A house after twenty years resembles the house you knew. A recipe in another kitchen resembles the one made before you were old enough to understand why everybody cared about it. A man can resemble the boy he was without owing the boy his whole future. I like that. Maybe because I have spent so much of my life trying to decide which version was the real one. The Georgia version. The Montana version. The one in Germany. The one who arrived in Colorado. The one who left. The one who came back. The one writing this. I have treated identity occasionally like a police lineup. One of you is Avery Lane Maxwell. Please step forward. No wonder nobody volunteered.
I think all of them were. They just had different light.
That may be what fall teaches better than any other season. Change the light and the whole landscape tells you something else about itself. The trees are not becoming more honest in October. They were not lying in July. They are responding to conditions. Shorter days. Cold nights. Less light. The green withdraws. Something underneath becomes visible. We call that color. Maybe because saying, look what was there the whole time, would take too long.
I have a scene I have been working on lately. Elias is at a fire. Of course he is. Apparently I have decided this man will never be allowed to experience an emotion without there being coffee, an old house, or some form of controlled combustion nearby. He builds the fire early. Later in the day he comes back to it. A log shifts. The fire changes. And Elias gets up to fix it. There is nothing wrong with the fire. He knows there is nothing wrong with the fire. He still gets up. He moves the log half an inch. Then he realizes something he has spent a very long time learning. The fire was fine on its own. I love him for getting up anyway.
That matters. I am not interested in writing a version of myself, or Elias, who becomes so evolved that he stops touching the poker. That sounds unbearable. Growth cannot possibly mean becoming a man who never fusses with anything. I have businesses. I would be useless. No. He gets up. He adjusts it. Then he knows what he did. That is the change. Awareness arrives before perfection. Sometimes considerably before.
I think fall is full of that lesson too. There is nothing wrong with the tree. This is important. The leaf changing color is not a symptom of failure. The field going brown has not lost its way. The woods opening up as the leaves thin are not becoming less themselves. The season is not broken because it cannot remain July. And yet I have asked myself to do what no tree on Maley Road was ever asked to do. Stay green. Stay recognizable. Stay useful in the same way. Stay where everyone knows how to find you. Do not embarrass the earlier version by changing your mind. Do not leave the room if you once called it home. Do not stop loving something you once said you loved. Do not become unfamiliar. That is an exhausting amount of work to assign a living thing. Trees would never agree to it. Thank God. The fields would be terrible at it too. Every year they changed. And every year I recognized them.
Maybe that is what I have been afraid of for no reason. That I could become different and still resemble myself. There is something deeply comforting in that. I do not have to drag every former room into the next one. I do not have to reproduce every old life to prove it mattered. I can carry resemblance. A way of setting a table. A way of noticing someone. A recipe. A sentence. The instinct to decorate because a season has arrived and somebody should mark it.
I think about my stepmother doing that. And what interests me now is not what she put where. I could probably reconstruct some of it if I tried. That is exactly the sort of unnecessary archival project I would begin at eleven at night. But the objects are not the part that lasted. The marking lasted. Fall arrived. She answered it. She made the inside of the house acknowledge what was happening outside. There is something very beautiful about that to me now. A season changed and someone said: I noticed. Maybe that is decorating at its best. Not improving nature. Answering it. The leaves turn outside. Something warm appears on the table. A color moves indoors. A house participates. I have been doing that my entire life. I just gave it other names. Hospitality. Writing. Galena House. Still, by Design. A podcast. A book. A photograph. A candle. A recipe. Take whatever is happening outside the person. Give it somewhere to land inside. Maybe that is all I have ever been building. Places where the season can enter.
And this particular season finds me at an interesting moment. Things are changing. I am changing them. Some things are changing without consulting me, which I continue to find administratively questionable. There are rooms I will not occupy in the same way much longer. There are plans that did not exist a year ago. There are people I did not know. There are things I thought would remain that will not. There are new places already beginning to feel familiar. And I can feel the old instinct in me. Protect it. Name it. Understand it before it moves again. Take the photograph. Write the essay. Fix the log. Make sure everyone knows what this meant. But maybe not everything needs to be kept green. Maybe some things can simply turn.
There is another detail in the Elias pages I keep returning to. He makes scones. He stirs the dough until it barely holds. Then he stops. That is the difficulty. His hands want to keep going. Make it smoother. Make it better. Make it certain. But a scone does not reward that kind of devotion. Work it too hard and you ruin the thing you were trying to improve. So he folds it twice. Not four. Twice. Then he leaves it alone. I understand that man painfully well. I have spent years believing effort was an uncomplicated virtue. If some care is good, more care must be better. If attention helps, more attention will save it. If I can improve the room, improve it again. If a person matters, make sure they know. Then make sure again. If something is beautiful, preserve it. If it starts changing, perhaps I can negotiate. Autumn is not interested in negotiation. That may be why I need it. The leaves do not require my permission. The light moves. The field changes. The woods expose another layer. And the world becomes beautiful in a way it could not have become by remaining what it was. There is almost an insult in that. I appreciate it.
I think of Maley Road now and I do not see one autumn. That is the strange thing. I see layers. A child's autumn. A teenager's. The autumns I missed because I was somewhere else. The ones that happened while I was building lives in other states. The one happening now. No single year owns the road. No single color gets to say: This was fall. The road holds all of them. Maybe a person can too.
I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the versions we keep. What survives. What changes. Which parts deserve protection. I think I was asking the question too defensively. Maybe we do not protect a version by preventing new ones. Maybe the greatest protection is allowing the record to keep growing. Yes, that happened. And then this did. Yes, I was that person. And then I became this one. Yes, I loved that place. And now I am curious about another. Yes, I thought I would stay. I meant it when I thought it. That sentence does not embarrass me anymore. It comforts me. Because sincerity is not prophecy. You can mean something completely and still discover more later. The leaf was not dishonest when it was green. I think I will keep that. The leaf was not dishonest when it was green. It simply had not reached October. Neither had I.
There are places in my life I once thought had saved me. I understand why. A beautiful place makes an excellent suspect when your life begins improving inside it. But places do not save us. People do not either. Not completely. Neither do books. That would be far too much responsibility for a paperback. They accompany us. They give us somewhere to do the work. Sometimes a room holds still long enough for us to notice that we have become different inside it. That is not rescue. It is company. I have come to prefer company. Rescue is very dramatic. Company makes coffee. Company sits there. Company knows you are going to get up and move the perfectly good log half an inch and does not make a federal case out of it. Company resembles love more than salvation ever did.
And maybe that is why fall has become gentler to me. It does not ask to save anything. It changes everything in plain sight. Then leaves. And somehow we trust it will return. Not exactly. Never exactly. But recognizably. Resembling itself. There will be another October. There will not be this one. That used to make me sad. Now I think that may be the agreement. We get this one. The yellow outside this window. The particular cold tonight. The person we are now. The people beside us now. The road as it looks this year. The woods with this amount of light coming through. Take it in. Do not ask it to sign a contract.
There will be another season. There will be another Avery. I hope he resembles me. I hope he keeps the good parts. The attention. The loyalty. The ridiculous interest in getting the light right. The belief that food is a legitimate form of communication. The instinct to make a room warmer. I hope he loses some things too. The need to supervise every fire. The suspicion that leaving means failure. The idea that being needed is the same as being loved. The habit of treating every ending like evidence against the beginning. He can leave those in the field. They will decompose. That is what fields are for. And someday, perhaps, something else will grow there. That sounds sentimental. It is also literally how soil works. I appreciate when the metaphor has supporting science.
So tonight, when I think of fall, I think of my stepmother. I think of decorating. I think of Maley Road. I think of the woods. Fields. Leaves. Textures. The colors that kept changing every year while I was busy becoming somebody else. And I understand now that they were not different colors despite being the same place. They were the same place because it could hold different colors. Maybe that is resemblance. Not repetition. Continuity without captivity. A life changing enough to remain alive. A person becoming unfamiliar without becoming lost. And somewhere underneath all of it, one recognizable thread. There you are. I know you. You look different. Come in.
That feels like fall to me. It also feels, increasingly, like my life.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters