April was the first to go. April had always brought the snowmelt, soft rains, herbs gathered in armfuls from the alpine meadows. But that year, there were no rains, no herbs; the streets stayed slick with dirty ice. March dragged on, but couldn’t bridge the gap. It stuttered out fifteen days late, halfway through the hollow April left. Then came fifteen days of emptiness.
You see, my daughter, I’m trying to tell you what happened, like I promised. About all the ways we betrayed you, before you were even born.
You have to understand that even then, we thought April would return. We didn’t know that this was just the start. That we’d lose every month. And month by month, we’d lose everything.
People have always named their children wishfully. Once, they named them after virtues they wanted them to manifest: Patience, Faith, Charity.
And Hope.
Like everyone else, your father and I were warned about the future. We can’t plead ignorance. We brought you into the world anyway; an act of hope, or selfishness.
Hope was easy in May. But June never blossomed. We lost wild strawberries and nectarines. The meadows were parched, and the year was full of wounds that could not be pinched together.
By then we were frightened, but August arrived like August always did. We told ourselves we were overreacting. That it was temporary. Anyway, we did not need April and June, even if we missed them. We could get by with mead-coloured Augusts and Mays.
None of this was unexpected. The bird-women and the weather-watchers warned us, just as they had about the songbirds and glaciers.
But we still had seasons. Heartache winter; blink-and you’ll-miss-it spring. We had hope; we didn’t need to listen.
Hope is for cowards.
People have always named their children after what’s missing: a much-loved relative; names from a lost language or homeland. We named our children for the world we wanted them to inherit. We named them after what we’d lost, to remember. We gave them the names of the months we loved best: the neighbour’s twins named May and April; your cousin, July.
Your grandparents’ generation named their children Lark and Vetch, Minnow and Atoll, Eel and Cedar. Specific words, like single raindrops heralding the storm. But we are in the downpour now; the small names are drowned out. We have too many to choose from. We are overwhelmed with loss. Lake, Bird, Forest, Autumn, River, Rain. Our children’s names encompass half the world.
Really, the names are all the same. Every single one of them means, come back.
October was lean. That year in your grandmother’s kitchen, we scraped up only enough flour for a single loaf of harvest-bread. We left it plain: no currant-eyed fieldmice, no glossy, braided sheaves of wheat. We had always made the bread to feed our ancestors, but not that year. We short-changed our ghosts and spared our salt.
The ghosts mumbled inanities and blocked the chimney. Your grandmother had me running around with the broom, beating the rug and shaking them out of the curtains. After three days, we ate the bread ourselves.
By then, you see, we needed bread.
That was the last October. I think we knew it even at the time. The ghosts incoherent, dim as rain. A mean harvest. April drowned; October starved to death.
I can no longer tell you what the lesser-known months were called. There was one that smelt of woodsmoke. One that raised snowdrops. One that unfurled like clean laundry on a breezy day.
March was a shock. We’d always taken March for granted. Blustery, mutable; nobody’s favourite. We didn’t realise how much we’d miss its potential for change.
Without March to brace it, Spring lost its shape. It couldn’t withstand the hammer-blow heat, the floods and fires. A quarter of the year yawned empty.
Months were always messy. Better suited to honouring forgotten gods and emperors than keeping score of the year. But they weren’t easily replaced, either. You couldn’t just make up a month and demand that the world take notice. Not now. Not even when I was young. Too much potential was exhausted already. Too much was squandered.
We did try. In our village, halfway up the mountain, we named new months and seasons: the First Snows, the Time When Magpies Fly in Pairs, the Days of Swifts Returning, and the Forty Storms.
Nothing stuck.
You see the problem. These artifice months relied on things that could not endure. Snow, and certain birds.
We dreaded you asking about what happened to the world. We hoped, maybe, you’d never mention it. All this—what to us seems like such a glaring lack, a silence, a loss so resounding it changed everything—this is normal for you.
But as soon as you were old enough, you asked.
Your first question was what your name meant. That was hard enough to answer.
When a thing vanishes, its name becomes defunct. What does whale mean now? Or albatross? Just fabulist syllables. What use for honey-bee and dragonfly?
And yet we named you Autumn.
August and December were survivors. Extremes. August was bitter cold in the South, bloated with heat in the North, edges spreading like softened wax past the first and the thirty-first days. December was pinned by bright sharp things. Nails through a board. Icicles, windchimes, sunlight glinting off glass.
August and December clung on stubbornly, while the rest of the year collapsed around them.
But eventually, December bled out, and even August thinned to nothing.
After August, there was only one season. Its name was unintelligible and burnt the tongue. It meant something like summer, interrupted by storms. Nobody spoke it. Nobody wanted to evoke it, to call it any closer. As if it wasn’t too late; as if it hadn’t already been invited in.
These are our seasons now: The Heat. The Dry. The Devastations, in whatever form they take. Fire, wind, flood. This is the rhythm of the years.
Nothing is left of leaf-glow, of harvest and frost and rain. Autumn has lost its meaning. Two syllables are all that’s left. Two syllables, and you.
We named you after the world we hoped you’d have.
Another word for Autumn: Fall.
Used in an example sentence: Everything is falling.
Or this one: Everything has already fallen.
Still, we are working. We have learned there are different types of hope. There was the hope we used to have: hope that we would not have to act. That things weren’t as bad as all that. That we didn’t need to change everything.
The other kind is the hope that action is still possible. That is the painful hope you brought us, from which there is no hiding. It’s in your gaze, your questions. It can be elusive, confronting; it requires that we do a stocktake of our losses and the mistakes that led us here. It is hard work.
In some ways, it is like being a parent.
We want to bring the months back. The seasons. Can we do it? Nothing will ever be the same. So much is lost. But we are wrong about so many things. We underestimate nature all the time. Maybe life is more resilient than we’d thought.
We still imagine for you a world in which the word Autumn means something.