Now that the time change has taken place, the season of fall has finally settled in, and buckled down. The weeks are barreling past now, downhill, bearing their inevitable way toward Thanksgiving and the grey months of winter. Here in Washington, DC, the tourists are gone and the ducks have flown away.

More than anything else, the signal characteristic of the season for me is neither the falling leaves or the morning frost, but rather the strange and distinctive quality of autumn light. Gone is the florid haze of summer, Impressionist sunset colors superimposed and flowing into one another—“like lovers on opium,” to quote a line from a workshop poem I read back in grad school, and still remember twenty years later.

Instead, fall light is jewel-toned, sharp, shiny as a plate glass window. An artist acquaintance of mine, a painter who suffers from a debilitating mental illness, once described how unbearable the fall light was to him. Its very glassiness made him feel terrified, as though he himself were, at any moment, going to shatter.

I find the light both unsettling and exhilarating. But what preoccupies me most about that stark light at this time of the year is the breathtaking way that it can, so quickly, turn my mind to the past. And then I start thinking about my ex-brother-in-law, who is dead now, and how much I miss him.

For Washington, DC, the fall light, and my ex-brother-in-law are all a part of the same story, brought together in the Thanksgiving weekends I came down on the train from boarding school, because Mississippi was too far away to go.

I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. My sister was sixteen years older than that, a law school honors graduate already marking her trek upward as a staff member on Capitol Hill. My brother-in-law was the result of her improvident early-twenties marriage, the kind you don’t see much anymore, and from very early on it was clear that the match was a mistake: He was an aging fraternity boy and matchless raconteur, and to this day, whenever I hear the term “bullshit artist,” his face pops into my mind. He was also a terrible alcoholic, given to rages, and could not hold down a job.

It was my sister, wise and tireless, who cooked Thanksgiving dinner, who bought me Shetland wool sweaters from Garfinckel’s, took me to afternoon tea at the Henley Park Hotel.

But perhaps because he is dead, my memories of those weekends have somehow ended up being mostly memories of him. And over all of them in my mind—fused together with them—are the landscapes of the Northeast Corridor in winter: the monumental gray hulk of South Station in Boston, washed with rain; the yellow-dim train cars crowded with boarding school students talking loudly over the suffering commuters.

The cars emptied out after New York-Penn Station, but the train could take a full twelve hours to go from Boston to Washington. Only the hardcore travelers and eccentrics were still aboard, deep in the night, when the train finally arrived at Union Station, where my brother-in-law would be waiting in the deserted temporary terminal. As he jingled the keys in his nervous hand, we’d walk through the dark four a.m. streets—Washington was still the Nation’s Murder Capital then—back to the car.

Is it because this is the city where I now live that the grid of night-winter streets still haunts me? I remember going with him to a video store on Connecticut Avenue, its bicameral storefront split neatly into “VHS” and “Beta” formats, and every time I drive north of Dupont Circle, I scrutinize the blocks to try to remember where it was. One time he had the idea to buy DC, Maryland, and Virginia lottery tickets during one mad Beltway drive, and occasionally I’ll drive down streets and blink, recalling that these were streets I flew down with him.

And as we went about the city he told me stories, about his college years back in Mississippi, the politician’s daughter who’d become his first, teenaged bride, his party years as a door-opener at the Capitol back in the early 70s. He spoke to me as an adult, and I felt privileged to be on the other end of his disclosure.

But then there was the drinking, the bullshit talking, and who knows what else I’ll never know. One time he drove right up to the curb of the Russell Senate Office Building with a martini in a plastic stadium cup, and stood outside the car finishing up his drink, waiting for my sister and me to come down—something hard to imagine in these post-9-11 days, with the streets so heavily policed. I recall a night when he said he was headed down to the parking garage to get something, and he came back at eleven o’clock the next morning.

So then what? Eventually my sister left him, kept on with the honorable and successful life she’s pursued all along. He went back down South, entered AA and made amends to those he had made suffer—even became a marketing director for a corporate rehab center. Then he contracted cancer, and died before he was fifty. After the visitation at the funeral home in Jackson, my brother and I fled—to a bar, ironically—for a nightcap in his honor.

He was the boatman of death, it seems to me—at least of Persephone’s seasonal death that is even now settling over the city streets. I do not so much miss him, I realize, as I cling to his memory as a confirmation of my own.

Just two days ago, I was standing at the counter of Imperial Liquors on 17th Street, picking up a bottle of Malbec for dinner, the hanging, outdated fluorescents shining down as harshly as in a Paul Schrader film. In the middle of the shimmering plate glass windows I saw my own reflection, swimming.