James remembers an autumn when he was in fifth grade. He and his friends found a small green purse on their way home from school, and decided to throw it in an outhouse toilet. Later that day, Jimmy overheard a young girl crying over her lost purse. He felt such guilt, that still haunts him to this day.
The first smell of fall did it, like it does every year about this time. Oh, some times a sound will bring it back too, but the smell even brings back the taste and the slippery sweetness. When it is in the air you look at the mountains early in the morning anticipating that first touch of white. The smell seems to bring back the sounds too. The big balloon tires on a Schwinn bike crunching the colors out of fallen box elder and locust leaves on the way home from school and Miss Wasden’s fifth-grade classroom. It’s a smell that is almost too full of pleasant memories, like the sound and the sweet gush of juice when biting into autumn’s first frost-touched apple with its golden, water-cored center.