Pepper

Logan Johnson

02 Oct 2025 — 2 min read

I put too much pepper in my soup today, but don't worry. I did it on purpose. It's getting cold outside, so I put extra pepper in the broth to force that lingering warm feeling in my chest. I wanted my body to know that as the temperature drops, I fully intend to keep it warm. I have done this many years in the past, but it seems my body is still reluctant to trust me.

My body knows something that I do not: that autumn is a time for things to grow old and to die. I understand this on a logical level but refuse the principle for good reasons: I love my wife, I enjoy my work, and I like pepper in my soup, dammit. I do not care that the crown of summer chooses October to brown and to wilt. I would prefer to put off my decay until I'm a little less happy and a little less busy.

Yet something cries from inside me, from that biological cavern where the hearth burns. It tells me that autumn is a season for withdrawing, for taking to the hills, for hibernating by the fire with friends who understand me. It whispers in a foreign tongue I once knew and says that everything must go in its time.

And would it be arduous to go, when the time comes? I see the searing reds and the violent yellows of the canyon trees. I want to be like those leaves. I want to be a beautiful thing that grows majestic in the hour before it dies. I will surrender my youth only when I can exchange it for vibrancy.

I want to learn the lesson that my body can teach me about autumn, that it is not such a bad thing to lose the newness of spring.

Do not fear the passing of your days. It is a beautiful thing to creak like the old trees. The heart knows the truth: our love, our honor, our exuberant joy and our quiet sorrow, these will all live again in the freshness of a dawn beyond our own.

In some distant vernal time, the children will sing pure melodies to a beat we did not know but to which we would dance. And not long after, they will hear our music; for once they have burnt bright, the throaty hum of autumn will bid them, as it did us, to the solitude and peace of an earthly grave. ♥

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