Autumn

The leaves don't change much here, are more likely to fall out waxy and green than dry and bright. There's a scattering of desiccated three-pointed leaves, brown and curling in the grass, but not enough worth raking. But because Dallas has an annual pick-up of bulky waste each autumn, what we have instead of leaf piles are high mounds of brush and pruned limbs stacked on the curb, temporary wall-high thickets of dead plants, death conveniently organized and isolated and put on display lest we forget, with the ivy still growing and the trees still green with leaves, that this is a time to let things go.