Dear Sir or Madam, she wrote. For years I have believed that seasons are not proper nouns. But last night, I met autumn—no, Autumn—in the street. She wore gold on her sleeves and smelled of apples. And I realized: we capitalize what we respect, what we love, what we welcome like a guest. Autumn has a personality, a presence, a promise. She deserves the dignity of a capital letter.
In the small, orderly town of Grammatica, there lived a copyeditor named Clara. Clara loved rules. She loved the crisp finality of a period, the suspense of a semicolon, and the quiet dignity of a capital letter at the start of a sentence. But for years, one question had prickled at her like a stray comma splice: Should autumn be capitalized? should autumn be capitalized
The letter was never published. But Clara didn’t mind. The next day, she walked past the baker’s shop and noticed he had changed his sign. It now read: The Best Cake of Autumn. The A was tall, proud, and gold-leafed. Dear Sir or Madam, she wrote
That night, Clara walked through town. The air was sharp and sweet with woodsmoke. Pumpkins grinned from porches. A wind kicked up a spiral of copper leaves, and for a fleeting second, Clara could almost see a figure there—a tall woman in a russet cloak, her hair made of dried ferns, her laugh the sound of acorns dropping on a tin roof. She wore gold on her sleeves and smelled of apples
And that, she decided, was the only rule that mattered.
Clara smiled. “Sweetheart, ‘autumn’ shouldn’t have a capital A. It’s not a name.”
Clara smiled. She didn’t correct it. She bought a slice of pumpkin bread instead, and ate it standing in a swirl of leaves, under a sky the color of a capital letter.