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Autumn arrives, hauling a set of heavy suitcases. It whispers secrets to summer, scaring it away and sets up shop, begging use of heavy blankets and itchy sweaters. This is this columnist’s favorite time of year, when it snows orange and rains red.
If the sidewalks are slick, they are pasted with tissue paper foliage; if the sidewalks are dry, they crackle under your feet like a chorus of firecrackers following you home.
But there’s no crackle to be had in sixty-degree weather, no cozy sweater to be donned if you’re peeling off trench coats with unceremonious wrist flicks and a rolling of eyes.
Sure, we can blame global warming and in turn blame ourselves, but what’s really missing? In a world where nostalgia reigns supreme, how much longer will it be until the best parts of this season are only memories swapped around in reality?
A yard sale of memories flecking your lawn; beach days with large hats and snowy evenings with cinnamon scented potpourri packed into boxes and sold to the loneliest bidder. Walking through campus in the fall is a pleasure we all take advantage of. They don’t stick that image on the University of Maine homepage for nothing. It’s enticing, cozy and implies something intangible that you want and want now.
But when you’re sweating from the hike in your hipster garb, the romance is gone. Is it our fault the environment is now a mustachioed villain bent on tying our nostalgia to the railroad tracks?
Post-Halloween delivers holiday season madness a swift kick in the pants, encouraging a decent running start by Thanksgiving — Not specifically Thanksgiving so much as the Thanksgiving Day Parade, where Santa makes his first commercial appearance and all the advertisements in between floats become holiday-themed.
Beforehand, we had crescent roll commercials, but now we have full-on snow globes, and it’s part of the beauty. It kick starts a myriad of celebrations with the scent of brunt wood and we are powerless to resist.
But before we get there we are forced to pay the toll. Not unlike the ferryman, fall steers the boat of seasons around the bend. There are nubbly fisherman’s threads to be donned, apples to be snatched from trees, pumpkins to be viciously gutted and so on to pay our toll to the season sufficiently.
I need not list everything that makes this season great because chances are, they aren’t universal. But I’ll tell you what is: the closeness it brings. Maybe you don’t drink apple cider, maybe you don’t trick or treat, maybe you hate the flavor of nutmeg; whatever it is, we can still all agree on that fireside manner. Coldness brings closeness. You can sit in coffee shops without feeling like you’ve wasted the day. You can take a walk arm-in-arm without appearing sappy.
These will be postcards we tape to a wall if this grossly-named ‘Indian Summer’ keeps up. What’s to be done? We can’t reverse any environmental damage we’ve done, or at least entirely. And even if we could, the effects wouldn’t be immediate and dammit, I want my tweed now!
Have we upset the seasonal gods? As author Neil Gaiman suggests, gods are created by what we sacrifice to them and if our season is missing anything, it’s a good dose of upper magic. But the farms are running low on goats to be sacrificed and finding a virgin might prove even more difficult, so let’s stick to the basics: sacrifice by example. Beg fall into existence by practicing your traditions regardless.
Don’t let the number on a thermometer get you down, hell, get down regardless. There’s something to be said for faith in the face of adversity and if there’s anything I have faith in, it’s a good cup of coffee on a chilly fall afternoon.
Sarah Mann is observing the freshly fallen snow and contemplating how the seasonal gods misinterpreted her sacrifice.
