Winterfall

Winter in San Francisco for a Michigan transplant.

The air is swollen with that smoky scent of fall that

curls down your throat and settles on the back of

your tongue like a Spanish red wine.

This can’t be December. Christmas isn’t smoky

like this. I won’t say that winter needs snow, but

winter needs something more than chill and damp.

Winter is not the fall.

I remember golden Octobers with ice storms, because

fall can sometimes be winter.

Effigies of snowmen on every doorstep; in every

shop window, white cotton blankets, plastic and

glitter. Like a crucifix representing God.

Far off. Unknown. Magical. The way things are

meant to be. But nobody knows the magic of

the winterfall. The skirting of the season of death,

brushed aside by wave after wave of rainy days that

beat against us, hoping to freeze us, to make us believe.

But I know winter.

I don’t need plastic idolatry, or glitter, to tell me the

world is cold. Nor icy winds off the ocean, nor

chill, nor damp. I know winter. And this

is fall.