Autumn Falls Round And Robust ~repack~ -

As a young man, he’d read the poets—Keats, Hopkins, the usual wistful souls—and they all spoke of autumn as a sigh: a thin, golden weeping of leaves, a melancholy maiden with wind-tangled hair. It was the season of lovely decay. Of endings.

Elias nodded.

On the last night of October, after the last guest had gone home and the last leaf had let go, Elias sat on his porch. The moon was a perfect, heavy circle. The fields were bare now, the pumpkins carved into grinning skulls, the apples reduced to cores in a compost heap. autumn falls round and robust

When it stopped, Elias walked outside and stopped breathing. As a young man, he’d read the poets—Keats,

He spent the rest of that week harvesting like a man possessed. He didn’t pick the apples gently—he shook the branches and let them fall in booming drifts. He hauled pumpkins two at a time, staggering under their weight, laughing like a fool. He made pies with crusts so thick they could have been roof shingles. He pressed cider until the press groaned. He invited neighbors he hadn’t spoken to in years, and they came with their own round, robust offerings: jars of pickled beets, loaves of bread like golden cannonballs, a stew that simmered for two days and tasted like the earth’s own marrow. Elias nodded

He thought of the poets and smiled. They had it backwards. Autumn wasn’t the death of the year.

The juice ran down his chin. It was sharp, sweet, tannic, alive. It tasted like the rain. It tasted like the drought that came before it. It tasted like everything the tree had stored up in its dark, patient roots.