The Turn

The aspens turn all at once and then not at all, gold for a window so short that people drive in from three states to stand under it. The leaf is the oldest mark we have. It was on the first tag in 1973 and it is on the last one we will ever issue.

What the leaf knows that the visitors do not: the gold is not the event. The letting go is the event. A thing is most itself in the moment it agrees to disappear. The mountain does it every fall, without ceremony, and is believed each spring when it comes back.

Not everything comes back. That is the whole of the archive in one sentence.