From Timothy J. Noonan:

Because Summer turns to Fall drenched in that funky perfume of plants getting woozy in the fields. They've drunk a little too much sunlight, a little too much rain again. It’s time to sleep it off; pull that old blanket up over their never-gonna-learn seed-heads.

Didn’t local ancients believe that the drying, brittle-ing, reclining leftovers of Summer imprint upon the snow shroud their dreams of renewed tenderness, suppleness and warmth? Didn’t they believe that as the shroud sublimates it carries this prayer to heaven so that the Big Arm will reach up and grasp and pull down and spin the wheel of chance once again, eventually lengthening the days to show the breathless contestants what they've won?

I love that smell, the smell of death I guess. A whole rainbow of funky expiring plant smells, really. You'd never confuse the death smell of Black Eyed Susan for that of Timothy, or Japanese Knotweed. Not if you’ve remembered to stop and smell the death of roses.

Every hillside presents a funky sweet bouquet, an aromatic mosaic of almost-done-living color--and a complicated lesson. Luckily the program is offered annually. Eventually we notice that the colors of any wild half-acre field are as rich and various as those of a whole forest. We realize that the aromas soaking those fields and woods are as rich and poignant as the colors draped across them. Tourists may come and gawk. They don’t stay with Autumn, live and sleep and wake with Autumn. They can’t hope to understand the thing she is saying as the weeks and warmth slip away; as the scents and colors bleed together.

Then Winter. Winter is Deadness, still and lovely. Miraculously animated, you and I move through it. We get stuck ... but living temperately we’ve learned to rock from Drive to Reverse to Drive again without too much wheelspin. We get traction eventually, even if sometimes it takes a push from a friend or some passersby.

That's why Winter breath is visible, eh? In case one day we should notice that we are alive in the dead time, and tremble, and think it’s all just a dream. But as soon as we begin to breathe short, or sob, there it comes again, and again, the damp little cloud of undeniable spirit. Undeniable because every time we voice our fears, there it is again.

How do people manage in Florida?

Winter is Deadness. Autumn is Death itself. Death appearing live in a window near you, brightly costumed and kicking up it’s musky smells to the tune of That Drunken Piano Player in the sky. Lots of different smells but they are all funky, like work-sweat. Like sex. Each bears in its spiffy, coffin suit costume pocket a promissory note: “Something can be built of this (don’t despair.)”

That’s the olfactory rainbow covenant wafting in from the fields for us. And I get to go for walks in it.

That’s why I live here.