The air smells of nature’s slumber. Sunlight retracts, and branches dry, becoming less pliant. They lose their grip on leaves that have stopped making chlorophyll. The non-green colors that emerge are a happy surrender to the cooler air and shorter days. Wind and gravity coordinate, and the leaves disconnect, then dance downward. As the trees slowly undress they become brittle, craving sleep; their clothes no longer live, lying dormant on the ground: crackly, delicate, waiting patiently to become one with the earth. Decompose to recompose; transformation to transcendence, so that they might twirl and swing and flip and float again. Next year. They live to fall.