Wheat Ridge, Colorado — October 17, 2024

October seventeenth, Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The kitchen smells like apples before I see them — slices going pale at the edges, a green-handled peeler still warm from my hand. Out at the pond earlier, a buck stood in the dry gold grass and didn't move, just watched, ears wide as satellite dishes. A second deer grazed behind him through the yellow flowers. Ducks drifted by the reeds. The water held the sky. Back inside, the second bowl is nothing but peels and cores — pale green, yellow, red — and that's the part I keep thinking about. The scraps are a map of the day. Every slice on the counter is a trade: the deer get the orchard windfalls, the soil gets the cores, we get the pie. Autumn is just a long, quiet exchange, and if you're paying attention, you're already part of it.