Let’s get something straight: we are autumn people. Our Color Me Beautiful chart says so. Rust, olive, camel, mustard, pumpkin, aubergine, teal — the whole burnished palette has supposedly been our ally, flattering and reliable. And yet, we’ve grown strangely reluctant to play by those rules. These days we often dress in opposition to them, reaching for black, gray, or even an icy blue, as if pushing back against being so neatly defined by a season. Autumn may belong to us by color chart, but we still reserve the right to resist its uniform.
The first leaves are down on Snob Hill, here in St. Louis. Not many, just a scattered handful across the lawn — but enough. Enough to tilt our mood toward that oddly shaped state we can only call reluctance. And just then, as if to underscore it, Jesse Welles’ voice from his song Autumn drifts into memory:
“Never have I ever wanted to measure
The time like I want to do now
As the goldenrod fades and short are the days
I wish I could pause ’em somehow.”
Leaves underfoot, a lyric in the ear — that’s how it happens. Reluctance arrives not as resistance or refusal, but as hesitation. We love fall, truly. The leaf-peeping drives, the pumpkin-spiced rituals, the clarifying Missouri light after summer’s riotous greens. Yet reluctance tugs us back. Every fall is also a letting go, with the darker season waiting before it.
This year, reluctance comes tinged with disappointment. It probably won’t be a beautiful fall. Back in April and May, we thought this year might be different. The St. Louis spring was generous, wet and green, promising more than it could deliver. Early summer carried that promise, too, lush and smug in its abundance. But weeks without rain have parched what once seemed certain. A teasing “false fall” gave way to dust and dullness.
Our hopes withered, though hope itself lingers. Even the memory of hope can feel hopeful. But then again — is any fall ever beautiful when measured against what follows? Even the blazing, glorious ones, the postcard autumns that send people road-tripping through the Ozarks, are a kind of sleight of hand. Their brilliance distracts us from what’s next — bare branches, gray skies, and Midwestern cold stretched out like long bony fingers.
Autumn has always mirrored us. We have one parent between us, now 86 — his autumn journey slowly (or maybe not so slowly) shading toward winter. He laughs when asked how he is: “I’m in great shape for the shape I’m in.” But then, he’s always said that phrase for as long as we can remember. We cling to his words as we rake the leaves, knowing full well that neither task can halt what’s coming.
In summer, blasting the air conditioning, we can pretend it isn’t 95 degrees with matching humidity. Autumn strips away those illusions. The leaves turn, the days shorten, the dark arrives early. And with that shift comes another small, telling change: coffee. After a summer of cold brew, suddenly hot coffee tastes better and better, as though the cooler mornings unlock its full comfort. We take it as one of those intimate signals of the season, as reliable in its way as any leaf turning on the trees.
Other signs come from the outside world, less practical but no less persuasive. Wooly worms, though we know they’re unreliable, still catch our eye. Persimmon seeds, too: split open, they reveal spoons or spades, winter auguries passed down like family recipes. All of it — the coffee, the worms, the seeds — amounts to the same impulse: trying to read the season, to divine something about what lies ahead.
These habits connect us to older rhythms, to grandfathers with their Farmer’s Almanacs, spinning folklore into forecasts. They remind us that the language of autumn isn’t only written in the leaves underfoot, but also in what we drink, what we notice, and what we choose to believe.
These rituals hum in the same register as scratchy 45s on cheap record players — bent voices that endure. John Prine’s, especially. In Way Down he sang:
“Spring is just a smile away
Laughing at a summer day
Turn around, look at fall
Winter, hear my lonely call.”
Reluctance itself is a scratchy word, one that resists polish. The Century Dictionary reminds us: “Reluctant, literally, struggling back from, implies some degree of struggle either with others who are inciting us on, or between our own inclination and some strong motive, as sense of duty, whether it operates as an impelling or as a restraining influence.” That’s the state we know too well — pulled forward by autumn’s beauty, pulled back by its inevitability.
And yet, as Margaret Renkl has written, “Always, when nature works as nature must, there are joys for every grief, a recompense for every sorrow.” She has made a career of noticing what so many of us overlook: the small compensations tucked inside every change of season, the way beauty and grief share the same breath. Renkl reminds us that to give in to reluctance isn’t weakness but awareness — a slowing down, a way of honoring what is lost even as we mark what remains.
Perhaps that is what keeps us looking for wooly worms, splitting persimmon seeds, or lingering over the first fallen leaves on the lawn of a St. Louis neighborhood called Snob Hill. Reluctance may slow us, but it also makes space to notice what the season still offers, the joys folded into the griefs.
And maybe all of this — the raked leaves, the scratchy old songs, the readings we carry with us, even the wooly worms and the first hot coffee of the season — amounts to a pile of reluctance itself. A heap we both admire for its size and composition, and mourn for its transience (not quite as brutal as that Nine Inch Nails anthem about a “pile of shit,” but ours does share the same sense of inevitability). Tomorrow the wind will scatter it, and we’ll rake again. That’s the rhythm: rake, gather, scatter, repeat. Memories work the same way. They rarely stay where we put them, yet they return in different shapes, season after season. Maybe even hour by hour.
So here we are, reluctant. Not refusing, not resisting. Just pausing in that familiar in-between, caught between the pull of the season and the ache of what it signals. The first leaves remind us of what we can’t stop, of what we can only live through — and that there will always be more to gather. And as John Prine sang in Summer’s End:
“Summer’s end came faster than we wanted.”