On my walk home from work today, I was struck by a cold snap of the wind as the trees swayed against a clouded backdrop and I realized fall was on its way! People are often surprised when I tell them Fall is my favorite season ( With my undying love for Hawaii, most people guess summer) Fall was the one time I missed the mainland and after not seeing it last year, you can imagine the excitement I felt when I heard Fall whispering in the wind today.
From the time that first gust of cool crisp wind whispers in the hot late summer nights to the very first snowflake, I am in heaven. What is there not to love when nature provides us with a spectacular color show as bright greens fade into a thousand shades of yellows and oranges and reds and browns. The clouded skies provide the perfect screen in which to witness the glorious show and seems to add to the vividness of the jeweled leaves. I love watching the leaves drift slowly from the branches and dance in the wind with more grace then I will ever poses. The wind, oh the wind! There is something magical about the winds of fall, the still crispness of the chilled air that seems so clear and clean and the crack of the wind that encourages you to spend just a few seconds longer tucked in your bed in the morning. Its not just the weather, its everything that fall brings... the sounds and smells and memories. Fall reminds me of camping with my family, wandering around the falling leaves searching for bobtwitches ( don't ask)in the same woods that my mother visited when she was growing up and snuggling into a warm sleeping bag with the smell of the campfire lingering on my clothing.
Fall reminds me of my grandfather who lives in a place where fall is a 7 month season. When I went to visit, He'd take me to the canyon covered with green trees and we'd look for the one tree who's leaves were starting to change color and then he'd tell me I was the first to see fall coming. I still like to believe that I'm the first to see fall each year.
The whole country is transformed by this season. While I hate watching football, I love that people wait all year for fall to come around so that they can dress themselves in their team's colors, gather together Sunday afternoons and bond with complete strangers over a game. It reminds people to take pride in something and to bond with a community be it around a TV, in the high school bleachers or in the nose bleed section of a stadium. For a few brief moments we forget our differences and come together for the love of a common good. Somehow it becomes the perfect time for families to just play together tossing a football back and forth in their front yard, coworkers and neighbors playing impromptu games in empty fields on the weekends - football season reminds us to take time to play.
Lets not forget the holidays that fall brings. I still get excited getting dressed up on Halloween. Chocolate bars and candy apples and late night parties where children are wide eyed with all the goods they snatched up from strangers who generously dole out treats. Halloween always marked the time when my family ( aunts uncles and all) would get together and spend an hour being scared ( or scaring each other) at a haunted house and then spend the next 11 months teasing the person that screamed the most until the next year when it became someone else's turn to be scared.
Thanksgiving is the only holiday in which being thankful is enough reason to celebrate in grand proportions. Families and friends gather to honor traditions that have been passed down a long lineage of Americans - special recipes, heirloom blessings, and the right of passage of cooking your first turkey dinner. My job as a kid was to tear up the bread for the stuffing and to this day, I can't tear a piece of bread without it reminding me of me at my grandmothers side tearing the pieces just right for her stuffing wearing an apron shes made herself and feeling honored to be a real chef just like her. Fall brings us crisp sweet apples, ruby red pears of cranberries, voluptuous pumpkins and gourds and the most heart warming bouquet of spices and herbs - cinnamon, cloves, sage, thyme, bay!
There is something about Fall that draws us closer to our friends and families, closer to our communities and our neighbors. The cool weather draws us in to warm fires and hearty meals shared with the ones we love. From the first whisper of fall to the very first snow flake, Fall is a reminder of everything I love in life!
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