You feel no sympathy for the dying summer, only excitement.
Peace and contentment, yes! But there is also a giddiness, an anticipation, as you leap into a bed of cold sheets made fluffy with layers. You wriggle around to thaw icy appendages.
The promise of sleep after a long day is like autumn.
It feels the same as that sensation—that physical manifestation of nostalgia—in your gut when you replay happy times: like memories of Grandpa’s cabin in the mountains now that both Grandpa and the cabin are not available to you.
Waking up in the loft you shared with your sister, with filtered sunlight streaming in the windows through the leafy oaks, the smell of bacon, the murmur of adults over coffee in the kitchen. The morning air is colder there at high altitude than you are used to.
And colder is special, because it is different.
Colder means you’re back to standing over the only heater in the 100-year-old house where you grew up, a sibling in front and behind you, laughing as nightshirts balloon up with hot air, before your turn is over and you must get dressed for school as fast as you can. The floor furnace has a faint burning smell, reminding you that winter is coming or has already arrived.
The lower temperatures lead to a denim quilt on top of your comforter, hot chocolate made on the stove with cocoa powder (the only acceptable way), and split pea soup served with soft, crusty bread, thick with cold butter. You eat it happily for every meal until it’s gone, because it’s so good.
It’s reading books on the red couch next to the Christmas tree, under various blankets from your mother’s (mysterious because you weren’t there) past: yellow with knotted yarn fringe on the ends, beautifully crocheted black and rainbow, or orange-gold and slightly lumpy with a fraying, silky border. The books make you sigh when they are over, and you wait to forget some of the details so you can read them again.
It’s lying awake at night in your childhood bedroom upstairs, knowing your sisters are dropping into sleep with you despite the roar of airplanes flying over every few minutes. The windows are original to the house and not completely airtight, but they allow you to study the shadow patterns of the Christmas lights and tree leaves playing on the ceiling, interrupted by a flash of white whenever a car drives on the street below.
Or, fast forward.
Again in mountains, but now you are older and higher up, three thousand feet higher than your grandpa’s cabin. Your summer job at the camp on the lake is drawing to a close, and every day ends in a cooler evening. There’s a freshness in the rush of thin air as you sit, panting, on the porch of your trailer.
So many stars visible; millions of pinpricks high in the sky, framed by the spiky black silhouettes of ancient pines. You are a tiny creature in a brisk, velvety dimness, but it grows a little brighter as your eyes adjust. The bumpy metal of the porch is cold under your legs and fingers, and you wait for your rushing heartbeat to slow and your puffing breaths to calm because you ran home past curfew after watching movies with new friends. Your breakfast cook roommates are already asleep.
Priceless are the moments alone in a place of fearful beauty. Is the cracking stick you hear the footfall of a mountain lion or bear? You remember with every beat of star-gazing wonder, every rush of cool air sucked into greedy lungs, that you are not really alone at all.