BEWARE THE AUTUMN PEOPLE

August 29

Autumn’s come early this year, fitting after what’s been, for me, a truly Bradburyan summer. This was the year that commercial spaceflight took off with the successful first mission by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, news that registered barely a blip on people’s radars…but this may be the year we look back on as redefining spaceflight and I want to remember it, to capture it the way Bradbury’s Douglas captured moments in “Dandelion Wine,” like fireflies in summer jars. We landed a rover on Mars with the most complicated set of maneuvers NASA’s ever performed, and recaptured the imaginations of millions with pictures from Bradbury Landing, named after Ray on what would have been his 92nd birthday. The inevitable cycle of life, death, and heartaching love and nostalgia converged on me with my younger brother going off to college, carrying with him the ghost of his twin, who we lost 3 years ago, saying his goodbyes to this town and his friends before they all scatter to the winds, to adulthood, to college, to the end of childhood summers. And of course, leaving a hole in my writerly psyche is the loss of Ray himself, evocative, endlessly imaginative, King of the Autumn People, whose words have stirred my soul since I first encountered “Dandelion Wine” the summer before 11th grade. He’s passed to his Forever Country, a land of perpetual Octobers and Junes, comprised of shadows, pumpkins and smoke and sunlight, pavement, and tennis shoes.

I don’t have many rituals, but the ones I have I stick to: I begin every summer rereading “Dandelion Wine” and when the sweet smell of autumnal decay hits the air and temperatures cool down enough so that low-flying bats follow me on my nightly walks around the neighborhood, I crack open “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “The October Country.” September is when the year truly begins for me, firmly ensconced in my psyche by 12 years of grade school and 4 years of college. I make my resolutions in September, prepare for the rest of the year when the leaves change and crunch underfoot. I look forward to everything that is in-between: the twilight time between day and night, temperature between hot and cold, clothing between summer and winter. I want pumpkin pies and hot apple cider and cinnamon hot chocolate and light sweaters and boots and Stephen King stories and mists over cemeteries and full moons in crisp autumn air and All Hallow’s Eve.

The season is changing, though it’s not yet the end of August. There’s graveyard dust in the wind and red-orange-yellow fire coming for the trees…