Perhaps it's age, or maybe living in a dense city makes you more alert to what you're missing. Just as I didn't get a better sense of home and its culture until I left, I needed to live in the city to understand the countryside.
Whatever it is, fall is my favorite season. It has the best holiday and shakes you into recognizing it.
My apartment is in an old converted building (a blessing from the far-sighted urban builders of the 19th and early 20th centuries) that gets devilishly hot in the summer and oppressively hot in the winter thanks to radiators outsized for the square footage. Leaving the windows open does little to relieve the pressure.
With the arrival of fall, though, I have respite. For a few blissful weeks, the sun doesn’t punish me and the radiators have yet to clank on. Cold evenings kick on the tea kettle.
Outside the window, the trees shed their leaves and the nights get brighter — I can see my neighbors again, along with the streetlamps.
The café offers apple cider again. Desserts get better with pumpkin. Jazz and bluegrass become even more fitting. Friends from the Czech Republic reach out — they’re in Manhattan, let’s go to Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (they do not know I am about to ramble about Washington Irving).
An even greater delight: fall means pawpaws, the greatest American fruit.
The wondrous treat, mango-banana-ish in taste, appears east of the Mississippi and west of the Atlantic for just a few weeks. In college, my brother and I would tramp through the woods collecting them, eating them as-is, make bread, or push them on friends to try. In the last decade, more local pawpaw festivals have popped up (I’m working on a story about them, so be on the lookout), but the most important is the Ohio Pawpaw Festival outside Athens and going strong for a quarter-century now.
The pawpaw’s fleeting nature makes a good metaphor for the fall. Summer decays, but fall is a transition that can be an end or a beginning. I’m oddly hopeful during fall in a way I’m not during the spring. Too many good memories, perhaps, or a reminder that everything must pass.
God dictates all. In the temporary, we find all of life.