Galena House Publishing.The Part That Stays Green.
## Episode Nine # THE PART THAT STAYS GREEN.
*A Tuesday essay. Read at the pace of a creek in September, which is faster than it looks and colder than it admits.*
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The leaves are louder than they look. I forget that every year. From a distance, aspens seem delicate, the sort of thing somebody puts on the front of a Colorado postcard with a tasteful amount of saturation and sells for seven dollars: gold against blue, elegant, arranged. Up close they are noisy. They tremble. They knock against one another. They turn their silver sides to the wind and back again, so that the whole tree can look nervous even when nothing at all is wrong. I like that about them. It is one of the few things in nature that behaves the way I do.
Today I went down to the water for a few minutes. I brought my phone, not because I had something to say, and I think I may finally be learning that those are sometimes the better circumstances in which to say something. The creek was moving. The trees were yellow, mostly. I crouched down near the bank because I wanted the camera low enough to catch the water and the aspens together, and when I looked at the little screen there was a green leaf hanging very close to the lens, taking up more of the picture than it had any right to. Behind it, almost everything had already turned: gold, yellow, that pale almost-white aspens get when the sunlight goes through them. And right there in front of the camera, green. Completely green. Late to the meeting. Unconcerned.
I nearly moved it. Of course I did. It was in the shot. And then I didn't, and I am glad, because I think it may be my favorite part.
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A few weeks ago I said the aspens had started. Not the whole hillside, just a few trees deciding early. Now the whole valley is doing it, that quickly. There is something almost rude about how fast fall happens in the mountains. You spend all summer waiting for summer. Then you become convinced summer will last forever. Then one morning somebody has changed the lighting. There is frost somewhere it was not yesterday. You need a jacket when you leave early. The sun still looks warm through the window, and then you step outside and discover the sun has become decorative.
And every person in Colorado begins saying exactly the same sentence: it went fast this year. We say this every year. Apparently nobody is keeping records.
But it did. It went fast. Summer always does. Maybe everything does, once you have learned how to love it. That sounds sentimental. Unfortunately, I think it is true.
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I have been trying not to make fall mean too much. This is difficult for me. I can make meaning out of almost anything: a chair facing the wrong direction, a light left on, a receipt, a cup somebody did not finish. Give me ten quiet minutes and decent lighting and I can turn evidence of absolutely nothing into a four-part emotional thesis. I run an inn. It is practically a job requirement.
So I have been attempting restraint. The trees are changing because it is fall. That is allowed to be enough. They are not performing a lesson. They are not asking us to release what no longer serves us. They do not have Instagram accounts. No aspen has ever looked at another aspen and said, this season I am choosing myself. Thank God. They are trees. It got cold. Something in them knew what to do.
I find that comforting. Something in them knew what to do. Not dramatically. Not all at once. One branch, then another. One tree early, one tree late. One leaf somehow still bright green while everything behind it has already become October.
That feels much more useful to me than letting go, because I am not particularly good at letting go. I do not even like throwing away boxes. A very nice box can derail an entire afternoon. You never know. It could become important. It has corners. It closes properly. This is how hoarding begins.
But change? Change I understand. I have spent enough time trying to prevent it to become something of an expert. And what I keep learning is that change is rarely kind enough to wait until the previous version of your life has been properly archived. It starts while everything else is still happening. You are still answering emails. Still washing dishes. Still buying groceries. Still asking somebody what they want for dinner. And meanwhile some part of the landscape has turned gold.
You do not always notice immediately. That may be the strangest part. There are changes in your own life that everyone else can see before you do. You are the last green leaf in the photograph, still insisting it is August.
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I do not mean this sadly. I think I used to. I used to think that noticing change meant preparing for loss. If something was beautiful, I immediately became aware that it could end, sometimes while the beautiful thing was still happening, which is a fairly effective way to miss a beautiful thing. You can sit inside a perfect afternoon and already begin grieving five o'clock. You can be with someone you love and wonder when they are leaving. You can arrive somewhere and immediately imagine the day you will have to pack. You can ruin a perfectly good September by thinking about February. I have done all of these. Repeatedly. With commitment.
But today, sitting beside the water, I did not feel that. I noticed the yellow. I noticed the green. I noticed the creek, and the sun hitting the water in little broken pieces, and I did not ask any of it to last. That felt new. Not profound. Just new. There is a difference. Profound gets framed. New gets practiced.
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The water was cold. I could tell without touching it. Mountain water has a look when the year begins turning: summer water invites you in, September water looks like it has other plans. It kept moving past the rocks. Around them, mostly. Over some. There is probably an entire philosophy in that sentence and I am refusing to give it to you. You're welcome. I just watched.
A few leaves had already fallen onto the bank. Not many. Most of the trees are still holding them, and that is another thing I had forgotten: the beautiful part happens before the empty part. We talk about fall as though it is the season of things dying, but for a little while it is the opposite. For a little while everything becomes impossible not to see. A green hillside can disappear into itself. Gold cannot. Gold announces. Gold catches every little piece of light available and throws it back, and the tree becomes more visible immediately before it becomes bare.
I don't know what to do with that yet. So I am leaving it alone. That is another thing I am practicing. Not every observation requires immediate emotional development. Some things can sit on the counter overnight.
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I came back inside afterward, and the warmth felt different because I had been cold. I love that. There are things you cannot feel until you have briefly been without them. Warm hands. A quiet room after a loud one. Someone expecting you. A lamp already on when evening comes. Soup, probably. I have become old enough to be emotionally affected by soup. This was not in the brochure.
The light has changed inside too. That happens before I notice anything else. Summer light enters a room with confidence; it takes whatever windows are available. Fall light is lower. It stretches. It reaches farther into the room but somehow asks less of it. Late afternoon starts looking like evening long before evening has technically arrived, and suddenly you begin turning lamps on again. I love lamps. This is not important to the essay. I just think overhead lighting has done enough damage.
There is a particular hour this time of year when the windows are still bright but the room has started glowing back. Outside is gold. Inside is amber. And for a few minutes the glass holds both: you can see the trees and your own reflection, neither one clearly. I think I like the world best at that hour. Nothing has fully decided what it is yet. Day, but almost evening. Warm, but cold if you open the door. September, but October has started standing on the porch. Green. Gold. Both.
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We ask ourselves for such clean transitions. I am done with that; now I am this. I used to love that; now I don't. I lived there; now I live here. I was one person; now I have become another. As though a life changes like somebody flipping a sign on a hotel door. Vacant. Occupied. Clean. Dirty. Please come back later. I have flipped that sign a few thousand times. It would certainly make administration easier.
But I don't think people work that way. I think we are more like the trees behind me today. Halfway. Several colors at once. A little ahead in one place, still completely green somewhere else. And maybe we would be gentler with ourselves if we stopped calling that inconsistency. Maybe it is simply September.
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There are people I have known in one season who would barely recognize me in another. There are people I knew years ago who still carry a version of me that no longer lives anywhere. I probably do the same to them. Memory is not especially interested in updates. It keeps people where the light was good: that person at twenty-two, that person laughing in that kitchen, that person in a car, that person standing beside you before either of you knew what the afternoon would become.
We keep photographs this way too. A photograph is almost offensively confident. Here, it says. This is what happened. And technically, yes. But a photograph cannot tell you what happened five minutes later. It cannot tell you what the person was worried about, or what they misunderstood, or whether they were happy for a second or for a year. It just keeps the light.
Maybe that is enough. I am becoming more interested in enough. Enough has a bad reputation. We hear enough and think compromise, settling, less than. But enough can also mean: this does not need anything else from me. This afternoon does not need a future in order to have mattered. This person does not need to stay forever for the kindness to have been real. This tree does not need to remain gold for gold to have happened.
There it is. Gold happened. Today. I saw it.
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I think that is why I took the video. Not because it was extraordinary. It wasn't. There are probably thousands of people standing under yellow aspens in Colorado today taking almost exactly the same video. Somebody has drone footage. Somebody has a camera that costs more than my first car. Somebody has already added piano music. Good for them. Mine is a phone sitting low by a creek. There is a leaf in the way. I crouch awkwardly in the frame. The water goes behind me. The trees move. Nothing happens.
I love it. Nothing happens.
I have spent so much of my life believing something needed to happen. A move. A person. An answer. A beginning. A return. A breakthrough. A big beautiful moment that would divide everything cleanly into before and after. And most of the moments I remember best did not know they were important when they occurred. Somebody laughed. Someone opened a window. The rain started. A door closed. A song played from another room. A person stayed fifteen minutes longer than expected. A room smelled good. Someone remembered. A tree changed color. I looked up.
That is most of a life, I think. The looking up.
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There is a temptation this time of year to hurry toward the cozy part. Pumpkin. Candles. Blankets. Fireplaces. Soup, apparently. We become very enthusiastic about being indoors as soon as the temperature drops below sixty. But I want to stay outside a little longer. Not because I dislike the warm room. I love the warm room. I may have mentioned the lamps. I just don't want to skip the threshold.
There is something important about the few minutes before you come inside. Cold on your face. Hands beginning to ache a little. The smell of leaves and wet dirt. The strange clean edge the air has when it has stopped pretending to be summer. You stand there for another minute, even though the light is going, even though somewhere nearby there is warmth, because you know you will miss this exact cold once you are inside.
That may be the entire trick. To know you will miss something and stay with it anyway. Not cling. Stay. Those are different. Clinging asks the moment not to leave. Staying says: I am here until you do.
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Maybe that is what I was doing beside the river today. I was not trying to keep September. I was keeping it company. That sounds almost too gentle. I am going to leave it anyway. I was keeping September company, for a few minutes. The creek kept going. The aspens kept moving. The sunlight kept changing. And that green leaf stayed in front of the camera.
I keep returning to it, because there is something generous about a photograph that refuses to become entirely autumn. It leaves evidence of what came before. Not hidden. Not erased. Still there. Green in the foreground. Gold behind it. Both true.
Maybe we are allowed that too. Maybe becoming something new does not require us to be cruel to whatever came before. Maybe you do not have to hate the person you were in order to be grateful you changed. Maybe the old place can still be beautiful. Maybe the old love can have been real. Maybe the old dream was not foolish simply because you woke up somewhere else. Maybe a life is allowed to keep several colors. I hope so. Mine certainly seems determined to.
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Outside, the aspens are going to keep changing whether I finish this sentence or not. By next week some of the branches will probably be bare. There may be snow sooner than anybody wants to discuss. Someone will say winter came early. Someone else will insist this is normal. Colorado will continue its annual tradition of having four seasons before lunch. And the green leaf will be gone.
That is all right. I have the video. But more importantly, I was there. I think those are different things too. Having evidence, and having been there. The older I get, the more I want the second one. I want fewer moments where I am so busy preserving the thing that I forget to inhabit it. Take the picture. Of course. Take the picture. But then put the phone down. Stay another minute. Look at what the light is doing. Listen. The leaves are louder than they look.
Maybe that is all I wanted to bring you today. A little water. A little gold. Something still green. Proof that the season can change before everything in it is ready. Proof that nothing has to become all at once. And maybe permission, if you need it, to stop asking whatever is beautiful in your life what it plans to become. For today, let it be beautiful. For today, let it be enough.
Fall came to the mountains. Not all at once. It never does. One tree. Then another. Then almost everything. And one stubborn green leaf close enough to the camera to ruin the perfect shot.
Thank God.
Hear it read, in the author's voice · The film · The letters