The Wilderness Between

11/ 11/ 09 4:35pm

Everything here is a little more brown. A little more brittle. The moisture in the leaves has begun to evaporate, and with it goes the vibrant colors. Even the leaves that cling to the trees are so. Soon, I hope to hear that lovely fall sound: the skittering of dry leaves across pavement. It isn’t real fall until the cold has sucked the color from those already dead leaves, until the dry husks wander, aimlessly, under the direction of the wind. Like zombies.

It’s hard not to think of death and decay as you watch, week by week, the earth retreat into hibernation. I wonder how the class changes when it is taught in the spring.

In the spring, I suppose, there is that excitement as green suddenly springs forth. It’s exciting. The green affects you as you notice the first patches of green grass and clover. The first buds on the trees. Seeing the earth revitalize itself after the long cold sleep of winter give you hope as well. Music returns with the color. Birds. And fresh spring rains. Spring is a natural aphrodisiac.

But autumn is brown. The world shuts down, preparing for the dead of winter. It is an interesting experience to watch such a process so closely. It’s like reporting the decay of a loved one. Watching your parents grow old. Here is a crow’s foot at the corner of an eye. There is a grey hair, and there is another. Most of the time, we are so lost in our own lives, we don’t even notice this process until it has already run its course.

One day, it is a little chilly; the next, the leaves litter the ground. Watching it so closely, it is easy to see how slowly it really takes place. Like most occurrences in the natural world, these processes take place at a creeping pace. I wonder how the world must look to the snail or slug. I wonder if time or death make any more sense to them.

I wonder how black came to be associated with mourning, with death. Clearly, the color we should be wearing is brown. Death, his scythe, and his brown cowl. Death isn’t black, the absence of color. If fall has taught me anything, it’s that death is at least as colorful as life. Brown is the culprit.

I never liked the color brown as a child. Back then, it was a color that seemed to be lacking any beauty. It was the color of poop, of dirt. If you mixed all of the other colors together, whether using paint or crayons or markers, you ended up with a thick, disgusting brown color. Brown is what is left over after all of the other colors have been spent.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate brown and the subtleties of its hues. The differences between a mahogany and maple. The golden brown of skin and the crust of a bread. Hazel and nutmeg. Death must be the brown of dead leaves, of the leaves who still wander the streets on cold December nights, so brittle that they break upon touching.