Reluctantly Falling Into Fall

September 2nd, 2011
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palm tree
Early this morning I opened the front door to get the newspaper and felt a chill in the air that can mean only one thing:  the seasons are starting to change and I don’t like it.

Summer is my very, very favorite season of the year.  It is totally the best!

I know, I know, I hear lots of you out there saying something garbled about the heat and humidity in DC, but I don’t care.  Summer is light clothing, fresh fruits and vegetables and long days.  Summer is bare feet, freshly cut grass and beach time.  My thinking about summer is: Bring It.  The hotter the better.

Temperatures below 75 degrees are cold and unwelcome.  But besides the change in temperature, I also don’t like the emotional shift that I feel happens when we pass from the month of August to the month of September.  Maybe it’s a holdover childhood days of leaving summer and going back to school in September, but I feel it’s something more.  What is it about the change of seasons that throws my thoughts in a tumble?  It’s almost similar to saying good-bye and I guess in a way that’s what I’m doing.

I’m saying good-bye to a time of the year that makes me really happy.  I’m saying good-bye to a sense of freedom and relaxation even though I’m really not ready to say hello to a time of year that brings shorter days, cooler climates, and the holidays.  Today, I saw pumpkins in the grocery store and I wanted to cover them up.  I’m not joking.  Mother Nature is forging ahead, working her magic while she moves us into another time of the year and in that process, I am thinking about how I’ll have to start wearing a coat, how I need to clean up the yard and what my husband would be doing if he were alive.  Every year I think I’m going to stop feeling that wistful way and I don’t.  I know that for me autumn is harder than spring but I think that has to do with the fact that he died in November.

It could be that in the transition from one season to the next I am thinking about how I don’t want it to get cold outside, how I don’t want it to snow and as I am thinking, I tend to let my mind wander which leads me to thinking about him.  He is still in and out of my thoughts depending on what is happening in the world, what is happening to me at work, what is happening to our son at college or what is happening to his four other children as they make their way through life.

It’s so funny how my son and I try to figure out when events happened by whether his Dad was alive or not when they occurred.  What year did that happen?  I don’t know…Was Daddy alive then?  He was?  Okay, then it must have been 2002.

I wonder about how he is and if he would like the person I have become now that he is gone.

Maybe I just don’t like winter because he liked it.

 

 

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