Fall On Campus: Autumnal Vignettes from Crimson Arts

As the leaves fall from the trees in the Yard and pumpkin spice lattes get added to the seasonal menus of the cafes in the Square, the semester picks up, making it even more important to find moments of mindfulness and enjoyment.

Read on for some of The Crimson’s Arts Board’s favorite memories of fall on campus.

Fall as a Fish

By now, the sun has been awake for almost two hours. From some place outside, a hushed whistle beckons me upright. Schools of leaves scatter the rays of light through my window screen. Some flutter with deliberate leisure. Some swoop down, like goldfish racing through a torrent. My throat is dry, my toes stiff from the morning chill.

“I might be a little late to class,” I ruminate.

After a hasty morning routine, I stand in front of my closet and pull what I need to break the wind. I hear a muffled whisper — this time from somewhere inside. There are a couple scarves in the corner, rubbing charge onto one another with an electrical gossip: static murmurs of resentment at being ignored since March. The fibers are speaking.

It’s the blue one causing a scene, royal and true. It gives me a sting as I seize it. I walk downstairs with my keys in one hand, the shrewd fabric wriggling in the other. As I unlock my bicycle, I throw the textile over my shoulder, like salt for good luck. I make sure it’s loose; I need to breathe, and it does too.

The scarf slaps me as I start pedaling, but our unitary acceleration deescalates the anger. My wheels crunch on brown matter, which has accumulated in the bike lane just before public works blows it away. Gravity, ever the trickster, pulls me up the northern half of Quincy Street. I feel the draft nip at my face and ungloved hands. My shawl trails blue along both sides of my neck. I am warmed with each flap. I thank my seasonal pectoral fins as I race through the torrent.

—M.H. Hans Bach-Nguyen

Scenes from the Dock

Amid the noise of freshman year, I choose to take my runs from Hemenway Gym and onto the Charles. I take an unknown turn, an unknown path, and land on a dock atop the Charles, standing to the right of a pool of lily pads. I stand there in awe, pausing my watch and my music, enjoying, for the first time in days, a moment of undeterred silence.

But soon, I’m assigned my first midterms, and I begin to run through the dock with little regard, mindlessly fitting in the miles before I must head back to study. And while the midterms go well, my runs grow unimportant. But it’s okay — after midterm season I’ll appreciate the dock again. Then, maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of it in the winter — see the paved path among the inches of snow.

So, after midterm season, I leave extra time for my run — a few more minutes to take in the view. But as I inch closer, I find that the gravel path I usually take is closed, and that the paved path I expected is filled with black ice and brown snow. As winter caves in, the dock is gone, even missed, without ever really being noticed.

My sophomore fall starts the same. I retreat to the dock for a quiet escape. And this time, my work still can’t wait. I have more deadlines to get in, more midterms to study for. Only, it’ll have to. Because I’ll take the time to notice the red leaves gathering on the edges of the wood, the lily pads fading beneath the autumn rainfall; the light wood growing darker from the water.

This time, I’ll notice how, through the fall, the whole dock glows with the quiet brilliance of goodbye.

—Staff writer Anat Goldstein can be reached at anat.goldstein@thecrimson.com.

A Glimpse of Change

I come from a place where there is no fall. One day, the leaves are lush and green on the trees, and the next, they’re dead and on the ground for everyone to trample and slip on.

As the fall semester of my freshman year started, everyone was hyping up New England fall to be some sort of cinematic sensory experience, but I didn’t buy it. However, this didn’t dissuade my high hopes. I lived in Grays Middle on the first floor, so I think I had a very picturesque view of the Yard.

As I was heading to Ec 10a one day, with Mac DeMarco’s “For the First Time” blasting in my earbuds, I experienced my first flurry of leaves falling around and on me. I decided to skip class that day and sit in the yard to reflect. That day marked my first journaling session, and although I’m unsure if I have grown significantly as a person since then, my writing skills have definitely improved. It doesn’t matter how well or poorly written my journal entries are because they will always be there, just for me.

When I think back to freshman year, my one recurring memory is seeing the Yard’s trees burnt in every shade of red to brown and smelling the satisfying scent of autumnal rain. Every day, when I looked out my window in Grays Middle, I could (almost) confirm: This is a home away from home. I am prioritizing my efforts to cherish these New England falls, as I’m uncertain about where my future home will be after college. Each morning this fall, I make an effort to get out of bed and admire the changing leaves outside the window of my new home in the quad.

—Staff writer Anmol Grewal can be reached at anmol.grewal@thecrimson.com.

At Home Here

“Cloris? Cloris?” My friend FaceTimes me as I scramble out of the sanctified quiet of Lamont’s second floor to answer. Outside, the wind slaps my hair into my eyes; it’s chilly. We talk about the small things — her new roommate, my latest Boston adventures, dining hall grievances. She makes me giggle as the Yard glows amber around me.

We trade glimpses of our new lives. I turn my camera toward Widener and Memorial Church, the turkeys and squirrels, the skylight in my top-floor dorm — the one that frames a sliver of the Yard if I stand on my tiptoes and peer through its cracked pane. She shows me her campus back home in California: stucco, glass-paned windows, bicycle after bicycle whizzing by. Three hours behind me, she leans in, midday sunlight on her face, while I show her the fiery glow of my sunset.

I have fallen into the syncopated rhythm of freshman fall — the tug between nostalgia for those who have shaped me and the quiet anticipation of those who will. Every time we call, her voice cuts through the harshness of the changing season. I listen again to the song that played over a slow dance, the album that kept me company through sleepless p-sets, the karaoke tune my grandma and I sang together. A new friend reads my favorite book, shares favorite artists, sits beside me, and already knows me so well.

I’m learning to find my place at home, here at Harvard. At the stairs of Thayer Hall, I stop and sit. Leaves slip from the trees in slow spirals — red, gold, then gone. Over the phone, I tell her I am leaving. We promise to call again soon. I feel so free, so grounded.

—Cloris F. Shi

Sunset Illusions by the Charles River

It’s almost a necessity to have the Charles River running besides campus. It’s almost a necessity, for me, to remember or forget myself by jogging every week alongside it. The Charles River is charming in all seasons: the framing of the autumn foliage, the crystallized monads and their winter azure aura, the dancing daffodils of the spring, and the buzzling excitement as boats glide past.

Flipping through my journal, I see entries musing on runs along the riverbank. Each depicts the clouds and the waning lights at dusk, while differing in their details. Standing on the bridge, I stare into the sparkling light-beads at the river surface, or glancing up, afar, to the foreground skylines — that orange entangling the grey, spilling the pigments onto the riverbank.

I see the bell tower enshrouded in the fish-scale clouds of scarlet; then, in a fleeting moment, they turn into dark purple like shivering lips. The river mirrors the abstraction like a gauche painting — a duality of reality and fiction. Yet that mere reflection is too a version of real existence. What then? The clouds and the depth of the sky absorb one’s consciousness. Two words occupy my entire mind: omniscient and omnipotent. Indeed, the sunset at the bridge echoes the feeling of glimpsing the future: something ominous revealed in that light of omen.

Turning back, the sun has already hidden itself beneath the water. There is an effect of a backlight by the bridge arches, framed by the silhouettes of tree leaves and branches. That dim yellow glow resembles the aura of old photographs, of a lost era. The Charles River is also the past — a reminder of all the walks taken here, the same place yet different times: clouds, leaves, water, daffodils, and you. The remembrance of things past amasses into a collage of fragments, recovering an evolving, fluid self.

Each stroll by the Charles brings a new revelation.

—Staff writer Dailan Xu can be reached at dailan.xu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @Dailansusie.