Today is the day

Today is both the sweetest and saddest day of the year. It is 84 degrees out, but an uneasy 84 degrees, like it knows it's all collapsing and will be 53 degrees tomorrow, like it knows that it will be at least 200 days before it is this warm again. And that helps make today the sweetest and saddest day of the year here, but it isn't it, quite.

The sweetest and saddest day of the year has no special name, and it regularly goes unmarked. Yes, this year it is gray and warm, but another time it could be cold and clear instead. It's not weather, exactly, or the length of the day, precisely. It is this:

I look out the high windows of the library, of our apartment, I walk along the river. It is a city of trees. The leaves have begun to change color. Their canopies of green are riddled through with aging yellows, with gold. Rust has swept into whole trees already. But, and here it is, nothing has fallen. Every tree holds every leaf. Seven hundred million leaves in the Cities, all there, all here, until tomorrow, when they fall,

and fall and fall and fall and Fall.