I’ve seen many autumns, but this one has managed to surprise me. New green things burst forth tender and young in spring and then come October and November they die and drift to the ground with a gentle, dry clatter. They cover over the street and our walkways and gardens and the windshields of our cars, and we just get used to clearing them all away, these husks of long-ago April’s freshness. They flutter around the tires of our cars as we drive. We mulch them and pile them and jump in them and cart them off. We would miss them if we didn’t have them—these leaves, a manageable reminder of our own mortality.

A couple weeks ago I went off my antidepressants. I started taking them in late winter of 2021, when I was living in Wisconsin. I’ve actually been off and on a couple times in the last few years, and had settled in for the last year or two at quite a low dosage. SSRIs can be a helpful tool, keeping your head above the fray. They work (as far as experts can tell) by suppressing your emotions, so you can’t be overwhelmed by sadness or fear. But of course, you’re very unlikely to be overwhelmed by anything else either.

I keep crying—brief tears, happy tears, tears for the sake of others. None of these things have historically been my trademark. It’s as if, in the last few years with all my passion chemically tamped down somewhere inside my chest, my emotional capacity has expanded without my knowledge, gained elasticity like a balloon, and now that I’ve undone the padlock I’d set in place, feelings are just leaking out in every direction, sweet and soft. 

I’m crying at an instagram reel about a teenage boy healing from brain damage, nearly welling up while reading aloud to my students, finding my throat tightening while a friend talks about her kids and their struggle to love each other well. I care more. I like caring. Caring makes good teaching, good relationships, good art, good people. Caring means I find myself thinking about the dead fall leaves day after day while I drive home from work. And while paying attention to the leaves, I am better attuned to notice a very old man who lives down the block guide his trash bin away from the curb, dragging it with unbalanced half-steps as his wife follows nervously behind.

Fall is the season of disrobing, of frailty, of each towering goodness of our lives visible in sharp relief against a grey midday sky. The trees shed all their hard-won covering and then they fall into a kind of dormancy for the winter. They go to sleep. Nature trusts that even while the heart-sap slows their Maker is doing a good work, that some day—there is no need to count the sunrise and sunsets—spring will come again, and they will rise, full of new green.