The world outside is yellow. The trees in my yard and across the street turn anywhere from dull brown to bright  yellow in the fall, depending on how much rain we've had during the summer. This year they're macaroni-and-cheese yellow. 

We peered up at the trees last weekend, commenting on how odd it was they hadn't turned yet. It happens so fast. They turned and began falling a few days ago, and now my deck is carpeted in sunshine even as it the sky is gray and rainy. 

It reminds me of "All Summer in a Day," a little, knowing how quickly this beauty will explode and then fade into another winter.

I stepped outside one afternoon this week and my skin didn't register cold wind. It didn't register a temperature change from the air of the house. The sky swirled with gray clouds, but I laced up my shoes and grabbed a fleece jacket and headed out. 

I wasn't sure how far I planned to go. I wasn't dressed to jog -- I was wearing paint-spattered jeans, a normal bra, glasses. Maybe just around the block, I thought. As it started to gently rain, I thought farther. 

For once, I wasn't wearing my little hat. My hair blew as the scent of my wet hairspray released, then washed away. My glasses fogged first, then collected perfectly round raindrops on their nonglare lenses. Earbuds nestled in my ears, I made my way through the rain into what will most likely be the last warm day of 2011. 

I had to keep walking.

I started sweating inside my fleece -- certain I would release steam at any moment -- and listened to the music in my ears. Looking through my dappled glasses made me feel like a cinematographer following her subject deeper into the woods, camera lens be damned.

I ended up at my jogging turn-around point before I realized the rain had stopped. I wiped off my glasses and scuffed across the sidewalk, thinking I smelled lilacs until I realized it was the wet, dead leaves under my feet giving off that sweet smell. If I inhaled deeply, the smell came back as the ground underneath the fallen tree in the timber beside my parents house where I liked to go as a kid and pretend I was in Narnia. 

All too soon, it was over, and that perfect contrast of steamy skin and not-cold mist ended the minute I walked into my climate-controlled house and realized how wet I was. Inside the house, not moving anymore, I was cold. 

The next day the temperature returned to normal for December in Kansas City. I'll bet the leaves don't smell like lilacs anymore. There was something about that day, that misty rain, the temperature that released a little bit of summer into the air before sealing itself against the cold.

"The leaves are starting to fall, Mommy."

"Yes. That front tree will go first. It won't take long. It usually loses all its leaves a day or two after they start to drop. Then the three in the back take a lot longer."

"Maybe that's the mommy tree, showing her babies it's okay to drop their leaves: Just relax and let go."

I thought of all the layers to what she'd said, what leaves provide to a tree, what faith a tree would have to have the first time it dropped its leaves if trees have souls.

Stunned into silence, I watched the leaves flutter to the ground.