I can’t see the leaf edges anymore, my son says. He’s looking out the kitchen window into the woods and, for him, into a smash green and gold. The absence of tree detail. I can look across the yard and deep into the woods and still see the shape of things. My eyes score each leaf. It’s early autumn, and the buckeyes fall to our porch day and night, sounding like a single handclap, and there are enough brown leaves in the yard now to rake into piles. I hear the blue jays squawking from the branches above the house. They only make such a commotion when there’s something around they don’t like. A snake traveling through the yard or the cat sitting on the railing of the screened-in back porch. In my head, I see their open beaks, their bird tongues tipped as arrows. When was the last time I took my son to the eye doctor? A year? Two years? I’ll make an appointment, I tell him. He’s fixing mac and cheese for lunch. I watch the orange cheese powder become a sauce while he stirs. My son is old enough to make most of his own meals now. He’s old enough to help with laundry and to mow the lawn. Later today, I may put him to work raking the yard. He’s not too old for jumping into leaf piles. Is anyone? I picture our yard at the end of the day dotted with heaps of leaves, and then I picture the leaf piles around the campus apartments where my family lived when I was a girl. Industrial-sized leaf piles constructed by a team of groundskeepers with blowers. The oaks that grew there were older than the university itself, the lowest branches well above my head. My brother and I would jump into the piles and be swallowed up completely. We’d hide our whole bodies beneath them and wish for a dog to jump in there with us. If my brother were here right now, standing in the kitchen, I’d ask if he remembers the swifts from that apartment building and how we’d stand on the lawn and watch them fly in and out of the chimney. Hundreds of swifts, forming funnels. The apartment building is no longer there. My brother is no longer there. When I visit that campus now, there’s just a grassy hill and a long view into the valley.