It’s late Fall in Cincinnati and everyone’s favorite season is coming to an end. (“Fall in Cincinnati” being most—if not all—Cincinnatians’ favorite season.) When mid-October rolls into the Queen City, it seems that people who haven’t uttered so much as a sentence fragment to you will be gushing about how beautiful Cincinnati is in the fall. And it can get to the point where you just want to quit everything, run outside and glut yourself with it. Spread yourself out under a tree and look up at intricacies of each leaf turning gold then red then green. Stare at it until you can no longer comprehend what it is. It could be a tapestry, a body, constellations, the Sistine Chapel.
Now is the older, more severe portion of Fall upon us. The portion that has people wondering whether today is the day to start heating the house and put the storm-windows in, whether they should start making plans for Thanksgiving, whether their leaf blower is broken or if it never really worked that well in the first place and whom they can pawn it off on for Christmas.
And these are the days of autumn where people start wondering whether it hasn’t just been autumn all the time. How in the world was there ever a heat-shimmer on that road? How did we not freeze to death when we walked outside without a jacket? How did we ever get houseflies inside our homes and how did we get them out?
