The autumn of his content

IT’S A FALL DAY. A perfect day. Some complain that the afternoon air is too cool, but we’ve been sun-blasted hot here in the foothills for five long months. The cool feels good. Like brushing your teeth. Like a snowy kiss.

We need this hint of winter. It herds us toward each other in substantial ways. Toward a kitchen, where soup is simmering.

Yes, I’m making soup. I would make soup even if I didn’t like soup. I turn on a football game, I chop some garlic, I boil some water and add a ham bone and some beans. Soup. It’s that easy.

The people I live with, the ones I care about most, are not around. It is pleasantly quiet in ways it seldom ever is. You can hear the floorboards creak. The snap of a brass lockset in a good heavy door. House sounds. In the corner, a dog snores softly.

I pour a soft drink over shaved ice. I turn down the sound on the game and put on a Todd Rundgren album. It reminds me of college and the papers I didn’t finish. Turns out that finishing stuff is overrated.

“I’ll come around to see you once in a while,

“Or if I ever need a reason to smile ... “

On TV, the Giants and Cowboys are going into overtime. Somebody loses a helmet. A place kicker practices into a net. I have seen this a thousand times, the closing seconds of a tight ballgame. In heaven, all games go to overtime.

During a Dallas drive, I sample the soup. Needs salt. I add salt. Needs oregano. I add oregano. I had a bad experience with oregano once. It was worse than being mugged. I sprinkle it carefully. Cooking with oregano is like cooking with gunpowder.

In the bedroom, a teenager stirs. He hasn’t been sleeping; he’s been hibernating. He is a Zits cartoon. He is a James Dean movie. I offer him soup. He scratches his head and mumbles, “I-dunno-I-think-I’d rather-have-cereal.” Kids.

I make a fire. It is the first fire of fall, the best fire of fall. I throw in a couple of pine cones to juice the air, and an issue of the New Yorker that I didn’t much care for. Overrated, the New Yorker. Too long. Too repetitive. Like a friend of a friend who won’t leave.

The people I live with return. They have been out buying a homecoming dress for the little girl. It’s a mystery why a little girl needs a homecoming dress since she’s still a little girl and will always be my little girl. I refuse to let her grow up. Kids are the opposite of wine. They don’t always improve with age. In the meantime, the toddler sits in the living room, content to play with the dust particles floating in a shard of October sunlight.

“You should see my dress, Daddy,” the little girl says.

It’s a green dress, the color of martini olives. Macy’s, probably. Or maybe the National Guard.

“I don’t know if I like this dress,” she says, trying it on again.

In my experience, there are two times a woman tries on a dress, in the store and again at home. One has nothing to do with the other. The fact that she liked it in the store will have absolutely no bearing on whether she likes it in her bedroom.

“That dress looks adorable,” her mother insists.

“I hate my hair,” the little girl says, though it is the color of chestnuts and hangs like expensive linen.

There is the threat of tears. The little girl hates her hair so much, they go out looking for another dress.

“I love her hair,” I tell the soup.

“We can’t play this game anymore ... “ says Todd Rundgren.

There’ll be soup here when they get home. And a fire. And a football game. Bread, warm from the oven, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.

The kids will come into the house, since it’s too cool and drizzly to stay outside, or to go to the beach, or to hang at some friend’s Jacuzzi -- all the usual activities that lure children away from the house in warmer months, which are glorious but disruptive. Fun but fractured.

Today, instead, they’ll come inside because the house smells of pumpkins and soup, like a country diner on a frosty day. Like a family cabin in the woods.

That’s why we like fall.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.