love/hate

I have a love/hate relationship with Fall. I love these muted misty mornings that open up into golden afternoons filled with shimmering red leaves and a quality of light that makes me wish I could paint. I hate the encroaching darkness that makes it harder and harder to wake up in the morning, and cuts my evenings short. It is this way every year. I get an undeniable sense of excitement and newness right around the time that school starts, followed closely by an aching for the Summer which seemed so endless back in June. I love celebrating my birthday, and that of my aunt and grandmother, in October, but I hate how quickly the holiday season follows, with its busyness, expense and forced jocularity. Every year I am taken aback at how utterly beautiful the Fall is, and not surprised at all by the downward tug of my mood. I don't consider myself to suffer from SAD, I think it is natural that my body and mind want to follow the quieting of the earth, but I always feel that during the time between the end of Daylight Savings Time and the Winter Solstice I am simply waiting, waiting for that axis to tilt.

Comments

[Kimberly]

Seattle is the farthest north that I have ever lived, and I am still somewhat surprised each year as the earth tilts us away from the sun. I now understand the celebration of the winter solstice as marking the return of the light in a much more visceral way.

[Cowtown Pattie]

Fall here in Cowtown lasts about 24 hours, between the last 90 degree day, and the first cold front. Leaves don't turn colors, they just drop off, still green with summer. I've gone Trick-Er-Treatin' when it was hot enough to roast wieners just held up to the sun's last rays. I am pea-green.