Autumn (in the Blue Ridge Mountains)

The Blue Ridge Mountains are as much a part of fall as sweaters, hay rides, and trick-or-treating. They say, though, that the Appalachians were once part of the same mountain range as the Scottish Highlands. That means that they’re ancient, that they are older than autumn trees, older than most life itself. But its hard to imagine them bare. In my memories, they are cloaked in red, orange, and yellow, drifting leaves like sparks from a bonfire. My favorite place was always Asheville, because there was a red double-decker bus café, which served ice cream and hot chocolate. You used to be able to climb up to the second deck. There’s a certain feeling that you get in childhood, walking down a darkening main street, a small silhouette and two bigger ones in the yellow glow of tall store windows. It feels quiet, as if everybody else is muffled. Your whole world is that road, the rising moon, the twinkling bell when you enter the shop.

And it’s nice to know that such a place still exists, even when you don’t go so much any longer. It’s a sort of home that you never have to leave the safety of, because in theory, if you go back everything will be the same. But places change as much as people do.

The damage that Hurricane Helene did will not wash away as easily as leaves in November. Everything will not go back to the way it was, though it can recover. My purpose is not to elegize, but to hold some sort of memory. No memories are infallible, and each time we look back the light in which we see them has shifted. As we change, our memories do too.

The autumn of my senior year begins to feel like a shedding of leaves, like a migration, like a metamorphosis. Autumn is a time to remember where you were the last time the leaves fell. It’s an opportunity to see how far you’ve come. At least in my case, I appreciate all over again the warmth of summer, the vastness it leaves when it ebbs. And the memories drift, red and brown and yellow and orange, and sometimes it would feel nice to take a great big rake through them, pile them up on sidewalks.

I think, though, in writing, they are preserved in a sort of amber. Sentimentalized, but intact and seen with all the right details. Magazines are nice to read when they first arrive, but they take on a whole new meaning four years down the line. Suddenly, it hurts to read about old new things. It’s a requiem for what used to be normal.

You never know for sure when there is going to be a last time, and even if you do, it hardly ever feels finished. I hope that the things that people leave behind can be kept between these two covers, so that when the time comes, walking down memory lane is as easy as flipping a few pages, or driving down a familiar road in the mountains.