STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — There’s something about this time of year on Staten Island’s tree-lined streets that feels untouched by the noise of the world. No politics here on a walk through a park. No urgency. Just the rhythm of nature doing what it’s always done—quietly, beautifully, without asking for attention.
Fall, in its early days, is innocent. It’s the season of noticing—how the light hits the trees, how the air smells different, how the world seems to pause just long enough for you to catch your breath.
Scents are heightened, and I find myself always hungry—appreciating a pie roasting in the oven, chicken soup on the stove, and even the smells of lawnmower-trodden apples rotting in the grass.
Between the headlines and the clear blue skies of recent days, I ask you to take a walk with me through our glorious Borough of Parks—any park—one of the many that remain stuck in time, like the Conference House in Tottenville or Snug Harbor’s gardens. By the girth of the trees in Clove Lakes or Westerleigh Park, you can sense they’ve seen a lot. But they’re still standing. It’s a quiet lesson: keep going.
The humidity amplifies the scents and sounds of the neighborhood. Aromas can bring a person back to another time. Fall doesn’t arrive with a bang. It slips in quietly, like a memory—unless, of course, there’s a trumpet player involved.
On many late summer and early fall evenings in Dongan Hills, someone practiced “Good Night, Irene” on the trumpet—over and over—while we ate dinner. My grandmother eventually had enough. She leaned out the back window and shouted, “Good night, already! Good night!”
We were all so close in proximity. Whatever was cooking on the block—tomato sauce, garlicky things, sausage and pepp-uz, fried fish—caught the breeze and settled into the air like a second skin.
As I write this on a Thursday morning after a rainstorm, the pavement is wet, and I can smell it—that earthy scent mixed with the faint perfume of leaves and distant rain.
Now, walking through Snug Harbor, I hear the chirp of cardinals and spot teensy golden finches darting through the trees. Crickets hum steadily. Hummingbirds float past like tiny spirits. Dragonflies tango midair, and monarch butterflies trace curly-q paths southward.
From the Conference House to Silver Lake Park, there’s a sweetness to this moment in fall—a kind of purity. The kind that makes you remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten, and put words to ephemeral things like tastiness and curiosity.
I remember when the sun roasted gum on the sidewalk to a well-done, appetizing pinkness. Tar around the light poles melted into swimmable pools—for very little people, in my imagination. If you poked through those black pockmarks with a popsicle stick, they had their own familiar funk—just like the overheated wood at the Dongan Hills train station, or the scent of pizza from Lee’s Tavern, just down a few flights of stairs.
So please, enjoy this fragrant time of year. Pay attention to the here and now, because one day it will be a pleasant memory kicked up by some unexpected scent. Cook and eat, then walk it off. Whatever’s troubling you may just disappear as you take your mind to another Big Apple dimension.
