Breathing in Autumn
I claim that autumn is my favorite season. It’s December, barely winter on the solar calendar, but I am not relishing this, the bare brown in-between time. I have not experienced autumn since 2013 and I forgot that it has two parts: the burning hues and harvest and then the time before the snow. I crave that bright blanket.
Normally, I would be working and living in Antarctica, inhabiting unending winter and sunlight, missing fall all together. The pandemic killed that possibility.
Instead, I ramble in the northern grey-brown woods at twilight, past empty vacation homes on Lake Champlain, longing to hear my boots crunching through snow. I want to see frozen air carrying my breath, over and over. This year is the year of breathing.
I intended to be guided by the antennae and tentacles of my animal body, to be a body among bodies. I attempted to abandon my lenses, my dualistic categories, and my usual ways of viewing myself as the subject that is separate, different, and distant from the world as an object full of objects. But desire to glean from the brown bouquet of the woods came easier.
I wanted to break, snip, and snap off twigs, bits of whirling vines, and dried flowers to take home with me as yuletide decorations. I sought consent from plants by gently bending them to see if they yielded, if they said okay. I didn’t know what an answer would look like. And then I remembered the relationship between bears and blueberry bushes.
When I lived in Alaska, I squandered happy hours in the tundra picking blueberries, maneuvering my arm through the branches to minimize harm and collect one berry or cluster at a time. Fresh bear scat reminded me to stay alert; bears love berries, too.
But bears swipe bushes with muscular arms, knocking berries down and cracking branches as they go. The escapees seed the ground; a single branch heals into two stems—the bushes grow fatter, like the bears.Maybe there is room for me to break branches, too.
By a marsh in the woods, I found milkweed, the exclusive nursery and food for monarch butterfly larvae and caterpillars. As COVID-19 metastasized around the globe last March, I hiked through Oyamel pines up small mountains in Mexico, where my mother’s family came from, to visit monarchs. In Mexican tradition, monarchs are the souls of our dead ancestors.
The higher we climbed, the more the trees undulated with rusty scales that breathed like lungs. Dead butterflies, or parts of dead butterflies, sprinkled the path and orange wings like leaves bloomed overhead.
(After Antarctica and before Mexico, I passed through Aotearoa, where the Maori people greet each other, forehead to forehead, by inhaling each other’s breath. The trees and I cannot have this luxurious exchange now. Leafless, a tree holds its breath.)
I traced the milkweed with my fingers seeking remnants of the translucent shells of chrysalises, the underworlds, the cradles of monarchs’ gruesome transformations into their next lives: metamorphosis means the caterpillar’s body disintegrates, its cells self-destruct through enzymes into primordial butterfly sludge. I found no chrysalises, but the milkweed pods were split open, exhaling seeds, saying yes.
The tiny brown seeds had soft hair, long and white like a crone. I threw a batch into the air—the burst glowed in a flash against the dusk, glowed only because other beings were in shadow. The air carried the seeds to a swamp where they would not grow. I tried again.
I held handfuls of soft seeds, pale as snow. I scraped away composting leaves and disturbed the dark soil with my boots. I pressed the seeds into the ground, over and over, and covered them with leaves that smelled like life.