By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Bright fall. On College Street, a tree glows yellow as the Dead End sign. Spear-shaped leaves flutter down, making diagonal chains of gold.
Leaves fly through the air on the wind, crunch underfoot in an earth-toned mass, pile up in tumbled flames along the sidewalk.
This street runs into a forest, which shimmers at the end of the block. The trees are still green, but just turning, so that the air is green and gold, the vivid sunlight shining through the leaves with their varying jewel-like colors: emerald, amber, a few deep ruby notes.
Color belongs to change, not eternity, says Lucretius. In the realm of color, nothing is fixed. Depending on the light, a dove’s throat may appear red or blue. As things decay and disintegrate with the passage of time, they lose their color, like purple wool pulled apart into smaller and smaller threads, scattering its substance until it breathes away all its brilliance.
It’s time I’m feeling, time in this redbud tree with its trembling, heart-shaped leaves, their green touched with bronze. Time in the maple already stripped of half its wealth, so that its branches appear to be strung with little red lights, while a rustling carpet spreads about it on the ground, rosy as a field of chopped pink lady apples. How marvelous that the passage of time can cause a change in color that feels like a gain rather than a loss. The first trees to turn announce their presence along with their imminent decline, holding up their torches that blaze out from the green background and radiate against the flat blue sky.
I remember Annie Dillard, in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she wrote in the woods about a hundred miles from here, describing “the tree with the lights in it.” Dillard writes of a girl, born blind, who became sighted after surgery, and was led into a garden. The girl, amazed, held onto a tree she perceived as full of light. For a long time after reading this, Dillard confesses, she searched for that tree. “Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.”
Dillard’s tree didn’t really have lights in it, any more than the tree in the garden where a newly sighted girl clung to a branch. These are effects of perception. They are awakenings: sudden visions that arise from the concord of objects, angles of light, the time of day, the human eye. They are the outcome of chance, which makes autumn feel like a lucky season. It’s not only the ripeness, the bounty of gardens and fields, that gives an air of good fortune to this time of year; it’s also the flood of opportunities, offered with each changing leaf, to perceive things differently, to see the tree with the lights in it.
It’s so bright out this afternoon, so brisk, both warm and cold, incredibly clear, there’s no one outside, a dog barks in one of the houses as I pass, there are pumpkins and scarecrows on the porches, fake cobwebs in the bushes, a long-haired cat stretched sleepily in a driveway, a row of potted plants, a baby swing, a pile of laundry baskets, a dusty van, a jumble of lawn furniture heaped up higgledy-piggledy, windchimes tinkling away to beat the band, kids’ bikes and toys in the grass, and this, right now, is the town with the lights in it. A sea-green leaf on the curb, chocolate-colored at its base, saffron at the tip. A big flossy pine tree looming over the street, dangling its cones like inverted candles, looking like an elegant grandmother coming into the room, leaning on somebody’s arm, her sleeves hanging down covered with decorative baubles, with more cones clustered thickly at the top as if this grandmother wears a heavy, slightly tacky but magnificent studded necklace. A hot pink burning bush. Dogwood leaves in a true, matte red, translucent where the sun strikes them. Colors so intense they look synthetic. Above the houses, as I turn around at the dead end, a puffy, red-gold tree that seems inflated, blown up against the sky, spun up there like a plume of cotton candy in a festive, sticky-sweet, orange creamsicle flavor.
In autumn, time itself becomes revelatory. The most basic and ordinary thing—the turning of the earth—presses color out of the landscape, making the trees flare up, setting smokeless fires along the ridge. I climb the hill, panting a bit in the sun, and the city spreads out below me, a haze of green flecked with bubbles of mahogany, ochre, and red, with the peak of Massanutten rising above it, a startling shade of mauve, the purple mountain majesty of the old song. And to my surprise, in this deserted spot, a woman comes striding toward me, bearing two onions in her outstretched hand. Like a personification of the season, she passes me with a jaunty step, her face gilded with light and an expression of unrestrained joy.
I stare after her. Can such an extreme state of happiness really be achieved through a pair of onions? One would think they were the last onions in the valley, an essential ingredient in a meal of unsurpassable significance and splendor, without which the life of this woman, and no doubt a great many precious family and friends—or, who knows, perhaps the entire city, the nation, the planet—would be damaged beyond hope of repair. And she managed to find them! Yanked them from a field at the last second! Triumph, elation! Only a drama of this kind, I feel, can account for her private and radiant bliss—that, or the season, wafting her jubilant frame up Summit Avenue, tossing her white hair on the wind like snow.
