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THE THINGS THAT COME AROUND AGAIN

by Elena Krause

The fire always starts in front of my house, a single spark in the branches hanging over our porch. It consumes the whole canopy and jumps to the next one in a split second, roaring down the block until all the neighbors’ yards are ablaze with fall colors. It’s fast. I hardly ever catch that first little flash in time—but even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

When I notice it’s begun, I like to go out and sit on my front steps, right under the burning trees. They crackle quietly as the wind moves them and they drop their bright orange leaves like glowing embers onto my lawn. I scoop up these ashes in garbage bags and throw them into the alley to be carried away and burned again. This fire, as fires do, burns only until it has nothing left to eat or until winter comes and the snow puts it out.

It’s a bittersweet process, the changing of the seasons. The switch itself is beautiful—the fire in the trees, the long shadows on the ground, the harvest sunsets, the cool air on sunburned skin. But I live on the Canadian prairies, and the start of winter also means the end of a lot of things I love. The lake freezes solid, and the lawn chairs are packed away into the back of the garage along with the grill and the baseball gloves. We pull the parkas out from under the stairs and watch the geese leave in flocks. Those who can afford it follow the birds. The rest of us head indoors.

That spark, that first orange leaf, always makes me feel sad. I tend to start missing things before they’re gone. At least, I think to myself as I watch the burnt leaves fall, summer will come around again.

Because that is how seasons work. That’s how almost everything works. Life is, after all, a very cyclical kind of thing.

It’s 7:00 p.m. and I’m snuggled up in a rocking chair with my son under a green and yellow knitted baby blanket that used to belong to his dad. The fire is still burning outside the window. It fills the room with a warm amber light that shifts on the walls and plays on the pages of the book open in front of us. We’ve read this particular book every night for the past several months; it’s one my mom read to me when I was his age. He calls it the bear book.

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF NOSTALGIA AS KIND OF A SAD FEELING, BUT MAYBE IT’S MORE OF A blessing.

I have the bear book almost memorized by now, word for word, but tonight I paraphrase instead, pointing at the familiar characters. “Look,” I say to him, “there’s a big bear and a little bear. The little bear is afraid of the dark.” I turn the page.

My son pushes away from me. “I read it myself,” he announces. He scoots to the end of my knees and jumps off. Settling onto the floor at my feet, he cracks the book open once again; he starts at the beginning. He points to the little bear. “Little bear,” he says. “Little bear afraid.”

I feel something familiar, and I realize it’s sadness—the same sadness I feel when I see the spark in the trees. It’s the start of the end of something I love—only this is different. I can’t smile and say to myself, At least his childhood will come around again. My son grins up at me from the floor. “Big bear,” he says. “Big bear give little bear a hug. Little bear happy.”

“Want to come back here and sit on my lap?” I ask, feeling a little desperate to have him near me.

“No,” he says. “I read it myself.” He’s proud.

I nod. “Okay, buddy.” And I realize this isn’t the first spark at all; that happened almost two years ago when he smiled at me for the first time. He is a whole tree full of red leaves.

“You okay?” asks my husband when I come out of our son’s room.

“Yes,” I say in a helium voice. It feels like my brain is pushing against the backs of my eyes.

He raises his eyebrows.

I sit beside him on the couch and take a drink of his coffee without asking. “He wouldn’t let me read his bedtime story tonight.” There is silence; he’s probably trying to understand why this would upset me so much. “I guess I just feel like motherhood is a lot of wishing away hard seasons and then realizing they’re gone forever. It’s trying to claw back through time because you didn’t realize what you were actually wishing away. Like when he wasn’t sleeping through the night? I just kept thinking, Soon, he will. This will be over, and he’ll sleep through the night. And now I think, That wasn’t so bad. At least I got to snuggle him to sleep every night back then. I sleep eight-hour nights and I want to go back to catnapping in forty-five-minute chunks just so my kid will fall asleep in my lap. This is ridiculous. Who am I?”

My husband gives me a hug because he knows better than to agree with me when I say I’m being ridiculous. I am ridiculous a lot of the time.

I wander out onto the porch to sit under the fire and reflect. Despite the flaming leaves above me, the air is cold. Stupid October. Fall is not my favorite season.

Moms always use that word—season—when they talk about their children. This season of life is temporary. We’re in a tricky season, a fun season, a short season, a long season.

But that word feels wrong because seasons are circular, and childhood is a line. When this tree I’m sitting under has dropped all of its leaves, it’ll shiver for a few months, and then it’ll sprout new ones. It gets to start over. If we didn’t savor the warmer months enough, we can take solace in the fact that we’ll get another chance—but when my son has sat on my lap for the last time, that’ll be it. It won’t come around again.

I rest my chin in my hand and frown at the fire. It’s burning so fast, and I can’t stop it.

I’m on the front steps again, only it’s spring now and the trees are starting to bud. The breeze is warming up, and the birds are back.

Every fall, when I’m mourning the loss of summer, I forget about this part—the part where new things grow and turn the neighborhood bright green. Summer is ahead instead of behind, and there are things to look forward to instead of things to miss.

And there’s excitement in knowing what’s coming next. The days get longer and warmer, the birds lay their eggs down by the water, and the kids play in the streets again. The apple tree in the backyard turns bright white with blossoms, and you look down the street and think, Was it this green last year? I don’t think it’s ever been this green before.

You don’t get to live the last summer over again, but you remember it because there are bits of it that still exist in this one. The heat from the sun on your face, a warm breeze, even the grating itch of mosquito bites on your bare legs. I’ve always thought of nostalgia as kind of a sad feeling, like a longing for what was but isn’t anymore. But maybe it’s more of a blessing. It’s bits of the past that have stuck around and hang in the air of the present.

My son is playing in front of me on the grass, driving little toy trucks across the lawn. He doesn’t fall asleep on me anymore, but he tells me he loves me, and he means it. The first time he did that, it was like spring, like a little green bud in the place of a leaf that had withered up and fallen down. It was the start of something new, but it was a familiar new thing.

Someday these leaves will burn up and he’ll be a kid who goes to school, and I’ll miss him—but he’ll be okay. It will be another new beginning, another spring. Someday he won’t live in my house anymore, but maybe he’ll meet someone special and start a family. And then maybe, the moment he lays eyes on his own baby, he’ll catch a glimpse into how I feel about him. That will be another spring.

Each new thing will have traces of the old things. I picture looking my son in the eyes when he’s twenty-five and recognizing the toddler who once snuggled into me so I could read to him from the bear book.

I guess childhood only looks like a straight line when you’re close to it, but when you pull back far enough, you see that it’s cyclical too. The leaves falling from the tree are beautiful, but they’re not the tree. Each new season and year brings its own beauty.