Wet Streets and Yellow Leaves

Let's turn back the clock, shall we? I'd like to give you an exact date, but I can't. My best guess will have to do, and that guess is November, about eleven years ago.

My life was at a proverbial cross-roads. I was living in a moment that just seemed so vivid, so important. At times like those, you think that the moment you're in is defining. Defining in a conclusive, put-a-period-on-it way. At times like those you can't see that life amounts to a string of defining moments. Each exists on its own, a microcosm, but all part of that endless string that ends at the grave. You can't see at that moment that no one is any more or less important than the one before it or the one to come. Hindsight casts a light uniquely its own.

It was a Saturday. The rain was falling steadily and the air was chilly. New Hampshire hadn't yet succumbed to the kung-fu grip of winter, but autumn had begun its slide into not-too-distant memory. The streets were strewn with a litter of bright red and yellow leaves, the rain pattering on them in a muffled symphony. The air was clean and smelled damp and fresh, the perfume of earth and the acrid smell of chimney smoke that associates itself with the coming months of cold.

I sat on the porch with a cigarette, the exhaled smoke mixing liquidly with my own hot breath and rising on the cool air. I felt miles removed from myself for the first time in what seemed like forever. I could feel the moment seem to grow, expand, becoming almost more than itself. I could almost taste the importance. Some defining moments pass unnoticed, exposed only by the scrubbing winds of time. This moment revealed itself suddenly, exposed by those steady fall rains.

I remember this moment now as if it were yesterday. I can still smell that wet, cleansing New Hampshire air. I can still remember the gears in my head turning, my perspective shifting to the rythm of the rain on wet leaves. This moment shaped me in myriad ways. You don't forget moments of such pure and utter awareness.

Later that evening it was a parade of people and beer and noise. We listened to The Vaselines and drank Newcastle. I remember talking to a Russian girl who I couldn't understand, partially due to her thick accent, but mostly due to the fact that she was insanely drunk. I remember being tipsy and walking in the woods, fumbling through the dark and laughing, trying to reach the top of a muddy hill so we could look down on the town. I remember lights twinkling through the mist. I remember there wasn't a shred of moon, and I often wonder how we navigated those woods in the dark.

I remember an otherwise unremarkable day that changed me in remarkable ways. That day defined New England for me in my own mind. I'll always associate it with the chilly rain on the leaves, the smell of smoke and the redemptive power of an unexpected moment that became something more.