Lost

LOST

Call it sentimental, but I still believe autumn has never been more beautiful than it was my first year of college. Not a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the world ached and sagged and all but cried with color. Hills rose up from smooth fields, their edges now green, now red, as the greyhound bus climbed from Massachusetts to upstate New York. The seats smelled of sour leather as the Berkshires unfolded like the pages of familiar books. I let my book fall neglected on my lap to drink the whole glowing landscape with open eyes.

She was wearing green dress. Under her brown hair hid amber earrings, gracefully set in silver. In the sun, she smelled sweet. After gathering provisions, we set out into that world of green. We walked barefoot and barelegged, as though the earth was a nectar of the Gods we had to absorb. The sky was clear and we could see the distant mountains through the arms of the trees. A warning peek of white, and then a deer's immense eyes, staring into mine. "They're jealous," she whispered, her breath brushing the hairs on my neck. She took my hand and led me toward a clearing moving simply, in and out of the light. The grass was curled, knotted and soft. It was warm for late October. We lay down in the grass, that afternoon. The aimless murmur of the radio from our parked car wafted up to us from the road below. A solitary hawk searched the sky, one or two leaves sprinkled the space between the trees, in that quiet afternoon.

It wasn't until we'd forded the creek and started home that we realized she'd lost one of her earrings. "Oh well," she said. "We'll find it tomorrow."

Before the empty static of telephone lines, before the silences, accusations, I sat in the living room stroking her hair. The knitted rug on the floor blended its purples with the wood beneath it, honey in the light. We stacked logs beside the stove, laughing at the idea of winter.

It was foggy the next day when we returned to the woods. The grass was dark and stiff, each blade standing out as though etched in stone. We looked for the earring, parting and tearing the grass with our hands, but it wasn't there. As I dragged my feet through the maze of stones in the creek bed, I felt for the first time the hard edges of roots, the unyielding force of the hardening ground. Eventually we admitted defeat and returned to our woodstove.

Three days later I had to leave. When I boarded the bus again I found a letter tucked inside my backpack. "When you are happily shining at me, it causes the air to lighten," she wrote. "We are the swaying of the willow branches and the smile of the sun. In a way, you have always been here Come back to the place we found." I lifted the paper to my face, and she was there, as she always was, in that day that was ours, those days that were completely and utterly our own.

Shapes change with time. The hills that looked big to me, after four years, seem stooped and lonely. She, no doubt, remembers this day differently, that day we lost the earring. "I was always detached," she says. "I think you just care more than I do."

On the bus ride back, I wrote that the hills in New York reminded me of the hills in the Berkshires. They were grownup, sophisticated, beautiful in a worn way. The air I drew in there was fresh, heady with light and the undertones of trees.
Of course, autumn is the season of irony. Nothing simple, nothing novel, nothing gold can stay. There was just that summer and that long slow autumn with the blackberries dripping juice on the still bright grass. I live just north of the Berkshires now, so maybe I haven't been able to escape that aura after all, that subtle, artful aura of shifting light.

I keep thinking, turning over this idea like looking for spare change. I'll go back. It will be autumn again, and I'll walk along the foggy tar until I hear the sound of water on stone and I'll turn and make my way easily between the clear bodies of the trees. I'll sit silently, in the place we found. I was always there. Just as under me the roots of the grass are waiting for spring, so I'm sitting, waiting, waiting, waiting.