I want to wear the hill as a dress, swaddle myself in dirt and trees and the October foliage in the 5:17 p.m. light of this specific evening. We speed past. The fleeting nature of the foliage, and this moment, makes fashion impossible but glory inevitable. I cloak my mind with the hill instead. I smile at the white sheets cut into ghouls hanging from the trees outside homes but think, doesn’t fall decorate itself quite nicely enough? When we get home I want to peel the Halloween-themed gel stickers off our living room window and tear down the faux-spiderwebs draped on the porch. I mutter something about not understanding decorations and you agree, but you’re just visiting, and my roommates love festivities. So the stickers stay. In bed, I decorate you with my spit, and the beauty of the moment is in its evanescence. There’s nothing evanescent about plastic decorations, except that one day we’ll choose to take them down; I think I get it. Sometimes when the crisp Vermont air frolics in my nostrils and the mountains suck the sun into them and its warped colors decorate the sky, I feel anxious that it won’t last and that there’s no way for me to save the feeling it gives me. I worry that I might waste all my moments like this. How can I savor a taste I can’t name? What kind of decoration am I for the earth, I wonder. Should I drape my nude figure against the earth’s dewy curvature? If words can adorn then I’ll write––I’ll write with my body what my mind can’t articulate, and move the air with my limbs, ornaments of movement. We decorate with Time, to colonize it. While we carve pumpkins, then turkeys, and slit the throats of pine trees, and finally ornament ourselves in plastic glasses shaped like our future—what do we hope will change with the numbers on the calendar? That certain slant¹ touches us earlier, and fades quickly. Does it remind you of your own mortality? Darkness isn’t so scary when there’s nothing conscious to perceive it. A supernova of leaves, the performance of their lifetime, gently perish under our feet. Bare branches shiver and giggle off snow: “Get naked!” Strip! Disassemble! Dismantle! But we cover ourselves up. With distractions, decorations, celebrations of the mundanity of the passage of time. On the full moon, more or less, that celestial body spotlights the spotting in my underwear and holds my maternity, and its ever-waning ability, on painful display. But aha! she certainly wanes too, and I think now, upon reflection, with a calm uterus, why don’t I savor the pain? As darkness shuts the slant, I press on, confident.

1.  See Emily Dickinson’s #320 “There’s a certain Slant of light,”