Scarf Season

Autumn is a penny coloured season in these mountains. Trees are light with yellow and scarlet leaves. The fallen, dead ones crab walk across the ground. The wind pushes the clouds across the sky, and people across town, to their destinations, to school, to work. Each lungful of air is crisp, and they only get crisper. He likes to open the window and inhale first thing in the morning. He says a frigid breath of air is like a throatful of very fine glass.

He does not think of autumn as the dying of a season. Other things rise in the decent of summer and green, he points out: the frequency of turtle necks, the height of snowbanks, the number of wood fires in the evenings, the sharp smell of evergreen trees and the presence of needles.

Whether alive or dead, I love this season.

Especially once he finds the scarf.

His scarf is striped brown and orange, so from a distance it looks as though he’s unraveled an old pumpkin and draped it around his neck. It breathes dust into the sunlight front hall as he ties it twice, once too tightly, and once just right. He opens the door of the closet for me. “I don’t know why I brought a scarf- I could have just borrowed one of yours.” He squints into the closets depths. “You’ve certainly got enough. Do you actually have any coats in your coat closet?”

“They tried to settle, but the natives drove them out,” I told him. I hook my chin over his shoulder and move aside the few coats I do have. The rest is just bags and some hats, and one belt that I don’t remember hanging up but possibly did on a drunken night. The scarves were the first, and they don’t take kindly to interlopers. Somehow I’ll always toss a coat over a chair or the banister before I consider arranging the scarves to take up less space.

A thick cord of wine wool sweeps the floor as I move hangers around.

I nudge him aside and pluck the scarf off its hanger, then hold it to my face. It smells like wet and frozen soil, and cigarette smoke, and cider.

“This is huge. It’s a circus tent that’s been unraveled. You didn’t buy it for yourself did you? Were you looking to live in it?” he says. “It is from an ex? Did you date someone nine feet tall with a three-foot neck and not tell me? Please don’t put it on. I’ll have to rescue you when you start asphyxiating.”

I wrap it loosely around his neck and use it to pull him to the kitchen. When I leave it over a chair and gather our thermoses and fill them with tea, I wonder just how many others are opening their closets to find Winter Scarves. I’ve never met anyone, but it’s just as possible that others have Winter Scarves and it isn’t just me, as it is that I’m the only one. I prefer to think that it isn’t just me. Supposedly, there have to be more people out there pulling Winter Scarves out of their closets (or bags or purses or drawers) than just me.

He wrestles his perfect scarf off for the moment and begins to organize the loose tide of teabags across the counter as I refill the kettle. “You need a box for these. What is your face doing?” he asks. He taps his fingers on the wall tiles. He has to reach across the counter to do it, but he likes the sound of his nails against the tiles. The kitchen is all yellows and blues, and his green coat dresses it up like summer. “You look sort of like you have a plan. Like, a super agent plan. Conspiracy? Are you going to suffocate someone with that scarf? Or burn it for fuel? Make it into a blanket for a family of orphans? Come on, it’s not really yours.”

I rub my thumb over his wrist. The wool fibres of his coat sleeve make my fingertips itch. “It’s not really mine.”

The boy I was with last year wanted to keep the scarf. He asked if I loved it and told me he would take it off my hands if I didn’t. He thought it was chic. The thought of the scarf around his neck might have been part of why we broke up.

He stares at it as though something might be hiding in the folds. Like a bug or a small woodland creature or a maturing child. He empties a sugar packet into his thermos. “Are you bringing it out with us?”

I fill his thermos for him. He looks a little less offended by the scarf. I’ve never known any problem that can’t be somewhat relieved by tea. “It isn’t a third person.”

“Are you sure? It’s saying a lot more than you usually do.”

“It’s not that loud. Are you about to say you only want to walk around where no one we know will be?”

He makes a face. I can’t imagine anyone not being completely charmed by it. “Don’t be ridiculous. Just don’t talk to me, and walk ten feet ahead of me.”

I screw on the lid of my thermos and grab the scarf. He looks more and more dismal as I wrap it around my shoulders. It smells more like fur than I remember. He backs up an inch when I lean in. “Two feet. An arm’s length.”

“Two arm’s length. And if I see your lips moving in my direction, I’m breaking up with you.”

He’s the first one to see me in the scarf. I watch him dawn his scarf again. It’s navy, and it sits under a tweed coat. His fingerless gloves look a little rogueish. Evening light spills and ebbs away overhead when we finally leave.

Everything smells like the end of autumn, like a scale tipping.

The scarf feels warm around my neck, almost over warm. It’s a heavy kind of wool, always heavier than I expect. As a little boy, I struggled to wrap it right. Now it sits around my collarbone and shoulders a little like a shawl. I wonder if my parents would recognize it if I facetimed them. They might have never noticed it, even though I waited always for it turn up, in the coat closet or the basket of scarves and gloves and hats. It always appeared like it hadn’t, like it had always been there and all that had changed was my noticing it.

“It’s like a mouth,” he says, frowning. “It’s eating your whole head.”

“I think you’re being a little judgmental,” I reply.

“I’m being very judgmental. That scarf deserves judging. I feel like I’m about to watch it grow teeth and go for the jugular. Do you still want to walk right next to me now?”

He doesn’t mean the question, of course, because he knows the answer. The sound of leaves scuttling seems muted, like it’s happening on the other side of a screen or a wall. Only a few weeks ago we could still hear cicadas screaming in the trees. Now all the sound comes from things with no heartbeats or thought. Leaves whispering, wind chimes and screen doors rattling. Even the mist curling at the end of the street has a sound, like steam hanging in the air. I laugh at him.

He smiles at me. It’s clear he likes my laugh, and every time I remember that I feel carbonated.

Some people are raking leaves in their lawns by their porch lights. Some kids are playing hockey in their driveways or in the middle of the road, with their puffy vests and gloves on. No one is very visible, but everyone takes quiet notice of their neighbours passing them by. A couple shivers on a swinging porch seat and drapes an enormous quilt over both their knees. Lamps limn window frames with buttercup light.

We cross from the residential area to downtown. The glass buildings have no light to reflect. Each one is dark and quiet, and some have so many huge windows they look like walls of black water. I touch the scarf around my neck. In my reflection, I touch air. I can’t tell if he sees it or not. He says nothing. Not even when I touch my finger to the glass and a frond of frost curls there.

Leaves scuttle quietly as we walk, then louder. There are more and more dry and dying leaves to scuttle. Each gust of wind, fiercer and colder, throws up more of the dead. Maples and oaks that were blushing start to denude themselves as we pass. The water in gutters glistens and stills and turns silver at the edges. In the public park, the only horse chestnuts that the squirrels haven’t made off with crack from cold. The sand in the playground is dense and sludgy as we walk across it.

“So close,” he says, nodding at a cluster of chrysanthemums. They look stark as sun drops in the grey. As he says it, they begin to look ruddy and faded.

“My mistake.”

“Do you put on this kind of show all the time, or am I the only lucky one to witness the scarf?” he asks with a pleasing half smile. I tell him he’s the only one. He looks long suffering. “It’s a heavy burden to bear alone.”

The wind has begun to howl. The tree branches clack together. They look more clustered even, without the leaves, all sniggering clannishly together like they think it’s funny to be so nude. Then they just look naked and cold themselves. My hands tingle like they’re covered in frost. His hand is very warm, and his gloves soft instead of itchy. The season lapses and changes as we pass it. I can feel the ending of it in my, like a light winking out, like a wash of cool water.

When we get home, he watches me return the scarf to the hanger in the closet. I take my time. As in the way of dreams, I know somehow that this is the last time I’ll see it. Tomorrow and every day after that my closet will be back to blue and black and grey.

He tugs me toward the kitchen to make hot chocolate. More than the fading of autumn, I feel winter creeping in. I feel it like a wet footstep in the wood, and a frost flower in a puddle, and a skein of sunset over a frozen snow bank. He calls me and I feel a whole season arriving inside me.

Art by Jack T. Cole

Text by Lucie MacAulay