Where I live, autumn typically arrives through storms. This year’s autumn, as if making up for the sudden entrance, has been unusually, uncharacteristically gentle. The murderous summer sun that hung above Shanghai is now overthrown, and the world lets out a long sigh of relief in the cool breeze.

Summer wind is not really wind, but a ripple of heat, like air around an open oven. Autumn’s, by contrast, carries a faint earthy perfume and a caressing gentleness that is both mischievous and alive. Even though it slams doors and turns my book’s pages backward, it has always managed to bring the scent of our osmanthus into my room.

The osmanthus had been there ever since we moved in, and it was my constant companion each autumn. It was not a tall tree––not all trees have to be grand to be remembered––but it had a subtle presence amongst the towering plane trees. After each rainy day, the osmanthus would pronounce its existence by wafting its scent into my room.

But this year it doesn’t: the familiar perfume of osmanthus is nowhere to be found; even the smallest molecule of scent escapes my nose.

I remember the day with razor-sharp precision: a warm day in the middle of a previous autumn, when they decided to cut the osmanthus tree down. A neighbor had made an offhand remark about how the tree blocked the sun; an inconvenience, he said.

When I asked my mother if she agreed, she looked at me, and said, “The smell is too sweet, and people could get serious headaches because of it. It’s better we remove it.” We had had this conversation countless times when the osmanthus blossomed each autumn, and now the prolonged argument was coming to an end. These reminiscences would make way for the unbearable noise of the saw now eating into the base of the tree.

I stood at my window from the second floor while the men worked, my palms sticky with the last fallen petals I had scooped up in a desperate attempt to preserve the osmanthus flowers that morning. I wished they had consulted me about the tree, but they never did.

The saw sounded like a preying animal, biting into the tree trunk, a hungry wolf. Wood dust steamed in the wet air; each pass of the saw threw a tiny confetti of pale petals into the sky. They cut lower, and the tree tilted, and for a moment I saw the whole thing in a single, terribly clear geometrical angle: trunk, saw, a small sky where flowering branches used to be.

I did not cry then. I remember only the way that the air felt wrong afterward, as if someone had hidden away a familiar companion, one that I had greeted each year, all year long, with a quiet, respectful smile.

The osmanthus scent used to seep into my room through the half-open windows, a vagabond carried by kind, autumn winds. It found solace in my room, as if I were the only one who understood and appreciated its graceful fragrance. I, too, found solace in its steady presence.

For a long time I treated the tree as if it were a small, private miracle – the proof that something could be both delicate and persistent.

But now it’s gone.

A new autumn arrives differently—more skeletal. The light is thinner, less gilded than the years before. Afternoons are stretched out and cool, and the sun is merely a pale coin behind a canvas of clouds. The air smells of wet earth and old leaves, not the concentrated fragrance of osmanthus blossoms. Once upon a time, the petals drifted like soft punctuation in the autumn breeze, but now there is a cleaner, briefer scent that passes like a half-remembered line of a distant poem.

The wind still laughs and slams the doors, but its laughter is now tempered, more attentive to gaps in nature. It moves through the garden with a new sense of politeness, touching the spaces where the osmanthus used to occupy. It is checking for strangers, brushing bare branches, tracing the empty spaces of the forgotten flowers, stirring the moss that slowly claims the cut wood.

Around the yard, nature has rearranged itself: grass shoots up where the osmanthus tree's root used to be, an ivy branch finds a new foothold on the fence, a neighbor’s plane tree peeks through the foliage and casts a dark shadow over the walls. The world I stand in now, the one I often view from my window, seems larger and more exposed.

Maybe the loss of my osmanthus is not as devastating as I once thought. Perhaps it simply had run its course, and now was the time to open the garden for the possibility of more life. Of a different life. The osmanthus would always remain a loss for nature, but it doesn’t have to be the same way for me.

I look at the open sky devoid of osmanthus branches. A bird flies by. I smile and return to my room. From my second-floor window, I shift my gaze toward the empty yard again. There is life, and there is hope – the hope, the resolve, that the osmanthus will live inside me.