DW's Blog

The Fall

by DW Green — September 23, 2026

“A meditation for the autumn equinox.”

I. TWO VERBS AND ONE LEAF

Four seasons, and only two of them do anything.

Summer and winter are names. They sit there. You cannot summer a ball across a field or winter down a staircase. But spring and fall are verbs first and seasons second, and I had walked past that fact for seventy-five years without once stopping to look at it.

Then I looked, and it turned out to be better than I expected.

Both words came into English the same way, from the same place, describing the same object. The old English phrases were the spring of the leaf and the fall of the leaf. One leaf. Two directions. Our ancestors did not name these seasons after the weather or the light or the calendar. They named them by watching a leaf go up and watching it come down, and then they got tired of saying the whole phrase and kept the verb.

So the two seasons named for motion are precisely the two that pass through balance.

I have written that the equinox is balance passing through rather than balance held. The Earth does not arrive at equal light and equal dark and stay there; it goes through, the way the inner ear goes through, making a thousand invisible corrections a moment and never once stopping to congratulate itself.

Balance is not a destination. It is a participation.

The solstices stand still, and English gave them names that sit still. The equinoxes move, and English gave them names that move. Four hundred years before I noticed it, the language had already agreed with me.

GOING DOWN THROUGH THE MIDDLE

This year the crossing happens on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, at five minutes past five in the afternoon here in Phoenix, and six minutes past six in Denver, where I am from. Late afternoon. Nearly suppertime. The hour when the light has begun to go long and gold and somebody is calling somebody home.

That is when the sun crosses the equator going south.

It is the same event as the spring equinox and it is not the same event at all, and the difference is the whole season. In March the Earth passes through balance on the way up. In September it passes through the identical point on the way down. Same latitude, same equal hours, opposite direction. If you were handed the numbers alone you could not tell them apart.

You can tell them apart standing outside. Everybody can.

I wrote in June, from the far side of the solstice, that the descent is harder than the climb and is a skill of its own. Stay upright. Stay soft in the knees. The sun goes down in order to return and never once panics on the way. At seventy-five I am walking the back half of my own arc, and this is the point where the back half stops being an idea and becomes the actual afternoon I am standing in.

And here is what I want to say about that, which is the reason this season has always been my favorite and which I did not understand until this year.

Fall is the most beautiful part of the year, and it is the part that is going down.

Not going down and making the best of it. Not going down bravely. Going down gorgeously, on purpose, in front of everybody, with the whole state of Colorado turning gold to watch.

THE COLOR WAS ALWAYS THERE

I had the science of the leaves wrong my entire life, and getting it right undid me a little.

I assumed the leaf turns. That green becomes gold the way a stoplight becomes red — one thing replaced by another thing. That is not what happens.

The gold was there all along.

A leaf carries yellow and orange pigments through the whole summer, underneath, the entire time it is feeding the tree. It is simply that chlorophyll is loud. The green is so strong and so constantly manufactured that it covers everything else. Then the days shorten, the tree stops making chlorophyll, the green drains away — and what is left is what was underneath the green since spring.

The tree does not turn gold. The tree stops covering the gold.

I have been writing one sentence for two years in a dozen different coats, and here it is again, growing on a branch outside the window.

Recognition, not resolution.

The caterpillar does not build wings; the wings are folded inside already. You do not become one with your neighbor; you recognize you never stopped being. The glass was always clear, and I kept smudging it with I. And now: the leaf does not achieve its color in October. It reveals it, by stopping the thing that was hiding it.

There is a red that works differently — the maples make theirs fresh, late, out of sugar caught in the leaf after the exit is already closing. So the season has both: the beauty that was underneath all along and the beauty made at the very end out of what was left. I will take that as fair warning against tidy essays. Some of what shines late was always there, and some of it is genuinely new, and no one standing under the tree can tell which is which.

THE TREE LETS GO FIRST

The other thing I had backwards is bigger.

I thought the wind takes the leaves. The wind does not take the leaves. By the time any wind arrives, the tree has already let go.

At the base of every leaf stem the tree grows a thin layer of cells for exactly this purpose. It builds the seam. It severs the leaf from its own supply, seals the wound behind it so nothing is left open to the winter, and only then does the leaf come loose. The tree is not robbed in autumn. The tree releases, deliberately, and closes up clean.

I have spent this year learning that receiving has two depths, accidental and intentional, and that when receiving becomes intentional it becomes a blessing. Sit with the tree a while and the other half arrives.

Letting go has two depths as well. Things are taken from us, and that is loss. Things are released by us, and that is a blessing going the other way.

The tree does not hold the leaf until something tears it away. It gives the leaf to the ground it is standing in, and the ground gives it back as the soil that will feed next spring. The cycle loses nothing. Water taught me that already; the leaf is only water teaching it again with a different vocabulary.

I am at the age where this stops being botany. There are things I will set down in the next ten years, and I would rather build the seam than wait for the wind.

THE FIRST HEAT

Now the part I actually love, which has no argument in it at all.

On Webster Street, when I was a boy, there came one morning every year when my mother turned the furnace on for the first time. The heat came up through the register in the floor and it carried a smell with it — the summer’s dust burning off the metal — and to this day I do not have a word for it. It was not a good smell by any standard a person could defend. It was the greatest smell in the world. I would stand over that register and let the heat come up my pant legs, and something in me knew the whole season was in it: school, and dark mornings, and the furnace working again, and everybody home.

I can smell it right now, in Arizona, seventy years later, in a house with a furnace that has never smelled like anything.

Then the leaves in the mountains, which change their odor before they change much else — that dry sweet rot coming up off the aspen duff, the same family of gift as petrichor, the smell of rain on stone. I wrote once that scent is the most intimate crossing of a membrane there is: the thing itself, in pieces, entering me. Not a picture of the mountain. Actual mountain, inside my head.

And the chill on the morning air. Not cold. Cold is January and has opinions. The autumn chill is a hand on the back of the neck that says: pay attention now, this does not last.

I notice that every single one of these arrives through the body and none of them through the mind. The register, the duff, the chill. Fall does not explain itself to me. It gets in under the door.

THE DOORBELL, AGAIN

Then Halloween, which I have come to think is the strangest and best thing we still do.

One night a year the whole neighborhood walks up to each other’s doors in the dark and rings the bell. Not for an emergency. Not selling anything. Children come up your walk, you open your door to strangers, and something small passes across.

I wrote a piece about a doorbell on a block in Denver in 1959 — you walked up, you pushed the bell, and you asked the only question that mattered: can Jimmy play? That was the entire social technology of an era, and it is gone. Except for one night in October, when it comes back for a few hours and we all pretend it is for the kids.

My sister Barbie threw Halloween parties in Littleton that people still talk about. Of course she did. Friendship never had to seek her out; it came up the walk and rang the bell.

And it is worth saying plainly what that night is: the year’s one rehearsal in opening the door to whoever is standing there. We put on the mask, and behind every mask is a neighbor, and the door opens anyway.

THE MOON THAT CHANGES ITS HABIT

Four days after the equinox this year, on Saturday the twenty-sixth, the harvest moon comes up.

I did not know until recently why that moon has its own name, and the reason is lovely. Ordinarily the moon rises about fifty minutes later each night; it drifts, and within a week it has abandoned the evening. But around the autumn equinox the geometry tightens and the moon rises only twenty-five or thirty minutes later, night after night after night. For most of a week it comes up nearly at sundown.

Which is exactly the week the crop has to come in.

A farmer with a field to clear before the frost got several evenings of working light in a row, from the one source that asks nothing and sends no bill. Our grandparents did not need a theology of grace. They had a moon that changed its habit at the precise week the work could not wait.

One of its old names is the Falling Leaves Moon. Another is simply the Harvest Moon, and I cannot write those two words without hearing Neil Young.

He made a record called Harvest when I was twenty-one. Twenty years later he made Harvest Moon, and released it a few days before my forty-second birthday. Same word, two decades apart, the older man returning to the younger man’s title — which is the turn itself, and the whole reason Eliot said the end of our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. The title song is not about crops. It is a man who has loved a woman a long time asking her to come out and dance under that moon, still.

Beauty and magic combined, as I said to a friend this week, and I do not want to improve on that phrase.

Lorenda and I are forty-four years in this November. I have no interest in a moon that only shines on beginnings.

STAN, AND THE SEASON WE KEPT IT IN

And then football, which for me is not a sport. It is a man.

Stan Frizzell lived twenty feet from me from the fourth grade through high school and was not my friend. We shared a street, which is not the same thing. The friendship got built decades later, in a single unhurried day at his family’s cabin in the mountains west of Denver, after the long drive up from Arizona — two men who had only ever faced the same direction finally turning and facing each other.

After that we kept it the way men like us keep things. Broncos season after Broncos season, side by side in the stands.

Not on the phone. Not over lunch. In the fall, in the cold, in seats, for years.

He carried leukemia a long time. He broke his back in the Amazon and lived to tell it, and he never once made any of it heavy. Stan the Man. Quite a guy.

He is gone now, and this is the first stretch of autumn I have written into since. So I will say what I have learned this month and let it stand as his part of the essay.

A missing is not a hole. An absence is a fact about the world — a seat, a season, a phone that does not ring. A missing is a relation, and a relation needs two ends, and I am holding both of them now. That is not a defect in the arrangement. That is the arrangement. The friendship was never inside either of us; it lived in what passed across, and what passes across does not stop simply because one end has let go.

No one misses what they did not love. The missing is the exact measure of it.

So when the season turns and the games start and the air gets that edge in it, the size of what I feel is not a wound to be managed. It is a report, coming back accurate, on what a man was to me.

Autumn was our season. It still is. One of us is just doing it from further away.

IX. THE FALL

There is a formal name for this season, autumn, which came to us out of the Latin by way of the French, and there is the plain English word, fall, which came from watching a leaf.

I have made this argument before about my own company. I chose company over firm without deliberating, and only forty years later dug up why: a firm is strong, and a company shares the bread. The plainer word was keeping the truth the fancier one had let go of.

Same here. Autumn is a fine word for a calendar. Fall is what the leaf does.

But fall is also the hardest word we have, because with a capital letter it is the name we gave to losing the garden. The Fall. The descent as catastrophe, as punishment, as the thing that went wrong.

I would like to take the word back, and I think the tree will help me do it.

The leaf commits no sin by letting go.

Nothing has gone wrong outside my window in October. The tree is not being punished. It is doing the most competent thing it does all year: withdrawing what it needs, revealing what it was hiding, building the seam, releasing on purpose, and closing up clean before the cold. Then the leaf goes to the ground and becomes the ground, and the ground feeds the tree, and nothing whatsoever is lost.

The descent is not the price of the light. The descent is the light, coming home the long way.

X. RECEIVED

So this is my favorite season, and now I know why, and it is not the football or the smell of the register, though I would not give up either one.

It is that fall is the only season that tells the truth about the shape of a life without flinching and without apologizing. It goes down. It goes down in color. It lets go of what it has been carrying all summer, on purpose, before anything can tear it away. It reveals what was underneath the whole time. It gets a moon that changes its habit to give it light for the work. And it hands everything it drops to the ground it has been standing on.

I was born in November, a week into the far end of it, in a snowstorm, the day after an election. Late autumn is the weather I arrived in. It has taken me seventy-five years to notice that it is also the weather I have been writing about all along.

On Tuesday the twenty-second, at five minutes past five in the afternoon, the year will pass through balance on its way down, and it will not stop to mark the occasion. Nothing will look different at five oh six.

But I intend to be outside for it. Not to observe it. To receive it, which is the only part I have any say in. Meet me in the field. The water is warm, the leaves are turning, and every one of them is on its way to

becoming the ground we stand on.

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