It took moving to New York for me to appreciate the season of fall.  (Let’s be honest, it took moving to New York for me to appreciate a LOT of things.)  Being surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers can really make a golden tree pop–and Central Park, in all its autumnal glory, is a sight to behold.  Every shade on the red-orange spectrum is represented, including some I had never known to exist.  Maybe I just wasn’t looking before, but I grew to love fall by living in New York.

As the temperatures in Atlanta have dropped, so have the leaves, and I’ve appreciated the golden hues here too.  But more than any other season, fall and its changes remind me of life in the city.  I think back to what I was doing this time last year, besides working on the Halloween costume: negotiating a respectable salary; wondering if the BF had had the conversation with The Dad yet; meeting AC for weekly dinners at our 30th and Park California Pizza Kitchen outpost; listening to Tim Keller live every Sunday night; counting pennies to pay for toilet paper.  Saying goodbye to that list was welcome in spots and sad in others.

And it leads to a reflection on where I am now: negotiating a respectable salary; receiving an email from The Dad containing a picture of Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade with The Husband’s name under it (TH received the email too; this is how my family shows love.  When we got it, I told TH, “He must really like you.”); spending lunch breaks holding my niece as she spits up and farts on me (and no one has ever done so more beautifully); listening to our new pastor on Sunday mornings, then Tim in the car on the way to work on Mondays.

This time last year, I was getting eviction notices from a corrupt management company; this year we are buying a house and planning a project that will both tear it apart and make it our home.  I’m spending Saturdays with The Husband going to tile warehouses and granite wholesalers and design showrooms and actually having fun instead of breaking out in hives like I predicted.  For a time in my life (i.e., the majority of the last five years), I thought I might be a perpetual renter and poop-dodger in the city that never sleeps.  And I had made a sort of peace with that: living at the poverty line (post-taxes) but affording nosebleed seats to the New York City Ballet; smashed like a sardine into an overcrowded can of people but finding reliable solitude on runs around the north end of Central Park; having no backyard but spreading a towel on my fire escape and watching the world go by.

I miss the city, and I let myself miss it.  Because acknowledging the sadness of loss doesn’t take away from where I am now and with whom I am sharing that Now.  It means my heart is big enough for both Then and Now, There and Here.  Things change: I used to hate fall because it meant another nine months of studying had just begun; now it shines with hope and possibility, even as old things fall away. For the rest of my life, whenever I see a tree gleaming with gold in the autumn sun, I will think first of New York, where so many of the gifts I’ve received in my life were revealed.  Including the biggest: a man, bearing no resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton, who made leaving the city a beginning instead of an ending.