Stories I Will Tell the Children: Fall

I had the pleasure of waking up with my legs wrapped up in a sheet and a blanket, the best and softest combination, particularly when mixed with cool air.  Fall is coming; I can feel it.  We had an unusually merciful August that barely hit 90 degrees but once, and now I am sensing that summer's heat is over and the briskness of autumn is just around the corner.  I can't wait.  I love autumn.

I can't quite describe my love affair with autumn, except to say that I wasn't always infatuated with this season.  But at some point during the last few years, I started to really love the fall season.  I wonder if it has something to do with missing home, because when I think of fall, my mind immediately reverts to all the wonderful things about fall at home:

• picking apples with my mom...sneaking a few straight from the tree...attempting to clamber onto higher and higher branches, only to be thwarted by my own fear of heights

• carving pumpkins after school with Becky and other friends from Chorale during my junior year of high school

• coming home to find that the corn that soared toward the sky all summer long was being harvested, and watching the stalks fall under the tractor, leaving a wake of bare land upon which the snow would fall

• seeing frosty dew on the blades of grass in the morning

• waking up to more than a hundred Canadian geese flooding the neighboring lot with the noise of their honking, then mirthfully chasing them into flight

• arranging my new school supplies: notebooks, folders, pens, pencils, erasers, loose leaf...

• observing the neighbors' evolving home decor to usher in the new season:  pumpkins, scarecrows, autumnal wreaths

• smelling the scents of autumn: apple cider, pumpkin spice, apple pie, cloves and oranges...

• taking in the miracle of the changing colors of leaves...Mom always said that God is so rich that He can strip away every tree in the fall, and replace each one with new leaves in the spring. 

• breathing in the brisk air, seeing my breath in the air for the first time since March

• gazing into the big, open sky, shrouded in that glorious hazy mist that signals the coming of winter

I miss it all.  I love fall.  I love home.  I love remembering fall at home.