Why Autumn Makes Us Notice More
By Melissa De Luna-Ribeiro
Lisbon · September 2026
On beauty, memory, and the lives we learn to see again.
The Season Begins at the Edges
September does not arrive in Lisbon with much respect for the calendar.
There are still afternoons when we drive toward the beaches near Sintra, where cliffs rise above the sand and the Atlantic breaks against the rocks, throwing spray into the wind. I love the force of it, the salt that sometimes reaches my skin even on the shore.
I do not enter the water. It is too cold for me.
I sit on the sand and let the sun find me. There is pleasure in remaining still while something immense moves in front of you. I watch the light across the rocks and often stay until sunset. This is one of the things I love most about living here: September can still contain such an afternoon.
Back in Lisbon, linen remains reasonable. Ice gives up quickly in a glass. The pavements hold the day’s heat long after dinner, and some nights the windows stay open until sleep.
The light has begun to enter the room at a lower angle. A shadow appears on a wall where there was none in July. Seven o’clock acquires an edge. At the market, figs darken and pears become heavy in the hand. Someone at the next table has brought a jacket. Soon, you notice that you should have brought one too.
There are perfumes that belong to temperature. A fragrance that seemed almost indecent in August becomes exactly right one September morning. Leather smells good again. Wool returns from the back of a wardrobe carrying the faint scent of wherever it spent the summer. Rain touches stone that is still warm, and a city you have walked through for years briefly smells unfamiliar.
Familiarity is useful. We could not live astonished by every door handle. The mind learns the room, the route home, the sound of the lift. Repetition smooths the world.
Perhaps this is why autumn makes me notice more. The familiar begins to behave a little differently: the light arrives elsewhere, a window closes, something put away is needed again. I find myself looking twice. What else have I stopped seeing because I know it so well?
What the Eye Keeps
This summer, the Collector’s Walk took us through familiar streets in Portugal, through Italy, and into the Swiss mountains.
These are places that make looking easy at first. Florence does not hide its accomplishments. Rome rarely whispers. Switzerland occasionally appears to have been composed by someone with an unreasonable command of scale.
A cathedral sends the eyes upward. A narrow medieval street allows only a slice of sky; a piazza releases it again. A cloister repeats its arches until walking becomes rhythmic. A room can make us lower our voice. An airport can make three hundred people walk faster without anyone asking them to.
We arrive prepared to remember the important things: the dome, the painting everyone told us to see, the lake, the mountain. And yet memory is disobedient to importance.
This is what interests me in a Collector’s Walk: what remains after the itinerary has been put away.
By autumn, the summer’s journeys have begun to rearrange themselves. The cathedral may blur while a door remains perfectly intact. You remember the faded red of a wall, an iron ring polished smooth by generations of hands, laundry suspended above a street.
The pattern on a hotel cup. A waiter setting down the salt and pepper before you ask. A woman’s shoes crossing museum stone. The peculiar green of a shutter. Your favorite people laughing somewhere behind you.
The Family We Carry
In Cortona, twenty-eight of us gathered for my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday. Some had crossed oceans. A brother and his family had welcomed a new baby boy and could not come; nieces, nephews, and cousins remained in the United States. We spoke of them over dinner.
There were relatives by marriage, close family friends, and people whose place in the story had long ago ceased to require explanation. “Sit next to me.” “Let’s talk.” Someone wanted a picture. Someone noticed that you looked beautiful.
Looking around the table, I found myself thinking, I’m so glad it’s us.
In Italy, I missed my grandparents. My mother and aunt were continuing the gatherings my grandparents had made possible. I thought about how much of that evening began with them.
My grandmother loved flowers, color, and youth. She complained about the smell of cheese, and about cups and spoons that were too large to look beautiful in the hand. They should be “chiquito,” “exquisito,” she would say: small, dainty, and properly proportioned.
I like remembering her that way. I can still hear the complaint. Even now, I sometimes see a cup and know it would not have passed inspection.
My grandfather polished his shoes in a particular way, took the same seat at the table, and never allowed food in his car. When he ran errands, he would ask, “Do you want to come?” If I asked where we were going, he would repeat, “Do you want to come or not?” The destination was not for discussion. It might be the park, fresh fruit, or a snow cone. There was always something waiting inside the mystery.
My grandmother kept the linen in pristine condition. She changed the curtains, moved the furniture, and made the house look different each time we returned to it.
And then there are the smaller habits: a ribbon saved, confetti tucked into a thank-you note, the table set even when only three people are eating. Someone always cuts the cake. Someone brews the coffee.
One day, without deciding to, you find your own hands doing the same thing.
Siblings carry another kind of archive. They may remember a version of you that you can barely reach anymore: the ridiculous clothes, the shared rooms, the joke that still requires no explanation. A sister hears the change in your voice. A brother sends one meme, and the entire history is there.
Affection sometimes arrives disguised as teasing or logistics. Someone has remembered what you forgot to ask for. You may be forty, fifty, or older, sitting across from one another at a table, and one glance returns you both to an earlier room.
Some family relationships require distance. Others make you reach for the telephone over something so small you would struggle to explain why you are calling. You know who will understand.
The Education of an Eye
As autumn begins, the light moves across the room. It reaches the side of a cabinet, catches a glass, leaves another corner dim. Something that has stood in the same place for years briefly attracts our attention again. I like this small disturbance of the familiar. It makes me wonder what else might appear if I stayed a little longer.
We enter a museum knowing what we have come to see. Caravaggio. Botticelli. Bernini. The name reaches the room before the object has had any opportunity to persuade us.
I have occasionally spent longer reading the label than looking at the painting. I like to think the painter would forgive me.
History and technique deepen the encounter. A painting begins to disclose pigments, patronage, the work of a particular hand.
Then something small catches us: a name carved in the corner of a sculpture, the stitching on a sleeve, the exhausted expression of a saint. A tiny silver object whose purpose we do not know can hold us there while the famous work waits in the next room.
We bring so much into a museum without realizing it. The hour, our fatigue, something we have read, the person beside us. Someone we wish were beside us. A color or gesture catches on a memory, and the itinerary loses its authority for a while.
Knowledge as Expansion
Recently, I stood in front of a wall in a Portuguese palace. The surface had been painted to resemble marble. Its veins, its apparent depth: pigment. Someone had observed stone closely enough to persuade plaster to impersonate it.
An eye can be educated. Look closely at enough well-made clothes, and eventually you begin to notice the cut of a shoulder before the label.
Handle enough lace and the weight starts telling you something. Spend time around old furniture and you learn what age looks like when it has not been manufactured last Tuesday. With embroidery, the reverse can become nearly as interesting as the front.
In a mosaic, you begin to notice the spacing between the pieces, how they catch the light, and the way they turn around a curve.
You want to know how it was made, where it came from, whose labor it required, which convention it disturbed.
Knowledge is sometimes used to establish rank. An artist’s name, a location, a school, or a language can become a small test of who belongs. A person who was about to ask a question falls silent.
I am interested in knowledge as expansion. I want to share what I learn for the pleasure of it, and for what it may allow someone else to discover. People should be able to ask the simplest question or change an opinion that once felt settled.
I love the friend who says, Look at this, and helps me see it. We may both leave with something we could not have found alone. Later, the knowledge carries the warmth of the person who gave it to us. Remembering it brings the friend back with it.
The Body Remembers First
The first wearing of a coat can bring back the previous winter. There may be perfume in the collar, faint enough that you lean toward it again. Smell is perhaps the most unruly keeper of memory. A room can be lost for twenty years and return in an instant because someone walks past wearing the perfume your mother wore. A bakery opens a childhood kitchen. Hotel soap returns a city. Jasmine brings back a night.
There are memories we search for and cannot retrieve. Then a scent arrives with the curtain, the floor, the weather, the person standing beside us.
In Proust, a madeleine dipped in tea brings back the narrator’s childhood in Combray. The sight of the cake had recalled nothing. In the same passage, Proust writes of smell and taste persisting after people and things have gone.
Perfume warms with the body. It enters a room with us and remains briefly after we have gone. People we love begin to associate it with our arrival. Years later, perhaps with our absence.
A phrase belongs to one friend because of the way she said it once. You can almost hear her say it again.
Friendship, Revised
Sometimes you meet a friend after years apart. One of you says something completely ordinary and the other laughs. For a few minutes, the catching up can wait. You are laughing together again, like the people who once knew exactly where to find one another.
There is something I love about the first evenings when it grows dark while we are still talking. Someone gets up to turn on a lamp. The window becomes a reflection of the room, and we realize how long we have been sitting there. Shall we make something to eat? The conversation finds its way into the kitchen.
I think of all the small observations through which a friendship becomes particular. She remembers how you take your coffee. He remembers which anniversary will be difficult. You bring back the ridiculous thing from a trip because you knew he would understand it.
There is great tenderness in being accurately known.
Long familiarity can make us careless with people, just as it does with streets. We speak to the version from ten years ago, while life has been happening to the person in front of us. He has stopped wanting something he once chased. She has changed her mind about a place, a belief, a future she described with such certainty that you assumed it was already hers.
A good friendship leaves room for revision. You can ask what has become important, what is missed, what beauty has been discovered lately, and stay with the answer when it takes you somewhere unfamiliar.
Sometimes the change is barely spoken. His joke comes half a second too late. She asks a question and then tries to make it sound unimportant. You notice that a subject has disappeared from the conversation. You cannot always tell whether to ask about it or offer dinner and wait.
The friend who takes the flight, comes to the hospital, answers the telephone at two in the morning may also be the person who notices these things. When there is little to fix, that knowledge may help us stay.
The Things Kept Between Two People
Some forms of attention belong only to the people inside them. Across a crowded table, someone catches your eye at exactly the right moment. You know what amused them. Later, you will discover that you both noticed the same thing.
There is the pleasure of being drawn into an embrace and allowed to stay there. A familiar voice from the next room. Someone making a little space beside them before you have asked. A conversation that keeps finding another subject because neither of you is ready to leave.
The touch you have been waiting for arrives quietly, and the body knows it before the mind has finished naming the desire. A hand rests against yours. You look up. For a moment, neither of you continues what you were saying.
Some moments have no photograph. They would not welcome one. They are kept in the body instead: the warmth of skin, a held breath, a look that lasts long enough to change the atmosphere of the room.
This is part of what makes a life abundant. There is so much to receive from another person that cannot be displayed, purchased, or explained afterward.
Beauty Beside Difficulty
There are years when beauty can feel frivolous. Life becomes administrative. An appointment, a bill, an unanswered email. Work disappears. A body hurts. A plan that once seemed certain begins to dismantle itself.
Difficulty is greedy with attention. It likes the whole room.
I distrust anything that asks pain to become useful on schedule. A garden does not reverse a diagnosis. A poem cannot solve every material difficulty. A beautiful dress cannot bring back the person who would have loved seeing you wear it.
Still, people have gone on making things in difficult years: poems during wars, jewelry for the dead, a table carefully set when there was very little to celebrate.
Someone grieving notices moonlight on the floor. A person in pain hears a cello. You are frightened, and then a friend makes you laugh; for thirty seconds you mean it completely.
Joy does not have to prove that everything is fine.
A Private Museum
I have always been interested in what people choose to keep. A handbag can tell the story quickly: an old lipstick, a receipt from a restaurant that no longer exists, a small figurine of a saint, a stone carried across countries for no defensible reason, a note that says almost nothing. People make private museums everywhere. A drawer, a wallet, a bedside table, a shelf near the door: each can become an exhibition of what a life has loved.
Consider a compact carried inside a woman’s handbag for thirty years. The hinge may be loose. Powder remains around the rim. There may be a scratch across the silver where her ring used to strike it.
A letter preserves something of the wait between one person and another. There might have been three weeks between writing I miss you and learning whether the words had arrived.
Imagine what longing did with all that time.
This is what I want the M&H Journal to do: stay with a place, a craft, or a person’s gesture while something of it can still be caught.
I have a great deal of faith in beauty. Even in a difficult year, I want to know what is flowering, what someone is making, which room in a museum I have yet to enter. There is pleasure in having something to look forward to, however small. A book waits on the table. Someone has told me about a fabric I would like to see and touch. I begin to imagine an afternoon spent looking for it.
Watercolor asks for that kind of attention. An old white wall can disclose ochre, blue, dirt, rose, sunlight. A shadow that first seemed gray has violet in it. The painter has to look again, then decide what to leave on the paper.
Photography involves another decision. Someone chooses where the frame begins and ends, what remains outside it. An image can leave its maker, be printed, slipped into a book, sent to a friend. Years later, someone who never stood in the original place may keep it for reasons of their own.
I like thinking about that next person. What I noticed may meet a memory I know nothing about. There is abundance in that meeting: another life, another interpretation, another way for attention to continue.
Back at the Shore
Soon Lisbon will cool. Restaurants will close their windows during dinner. There may still be a few afternoons warm enough for the beach.
The afternoon light disappears earlier each day. A pear reaches perfection and, left a little longer, passes it.
We know that life is short. Then we proceed through Tuesday afternoon as though several centuries remain available for errands.
I think of the family stories we know by heart, the questions we have never asked, and the ideas we have carried so long that we can barely remember choosing them.
Portugal has given me so much to notice: the shore, the light, the old rooms, the work of hands that lived centuries before mine. I am grateful for its history, its culture, and what living here continues to teach me.
For now, I am still going to the shore. At sunset the cliffs darken, and the familiar rocks begin to lose their edges. There is still a little light on the water.
Written in Lisbon, September 2026.
MDR