Fall, my favorite time of year, is coming to a close. As opposed to most of the other seasons, fall encompasses every one of the senses. You can see it in the trees and feel it in the air. You can smell it and hear it as the withering leaves drop and skitter around on the ground. You can taste it in candy and pies and turkey. I know it doesn’t officially end until about a month from now, but with the first snowfall hitting last week, I can feel it slipping away fast.
As a native West Virginian who isn’t a fan of mountains, fall was the one time of year I actually appreciated being surrounded by tree-covered hills. Everywhere you looked, the leaves would turn shades of reds, oranges, golds, and yellows—colors so vibrant that they almost hurt your eyes if you stared at them for too long. The beauty of that never ceased to instill within me a sense of awe, no matter how many times I’d seen it before.
When I was younger, fall was the season of apple butter festivals and cider. Trick-or-treating that made excessive candy consumption finally acceptable. Hayrides and bonfires. It was the month when the local hot air balloon festival crashed—quite literally—my birthday party when one of the balloons flying overhead sprang a leak and landed on the roof of my neighbor’s house. It was the time to jump in huge leaf piles before I was old enough to realize how many horrifying spiders were probably in there with me.
Now, it’s a time for getting lost in corn mazes for embarrassing amounts of time and loving every minute of it. A time to decorate your own home with straw bales and scarecrows and pumpkins and multicolored corn. A time to have a lights-out movie night on Halloween so the trick-or-treaters don’t think you’re home and knock on your door, creating a never-ending cycle of barking between your three dogs. A time for months of college football, which I follow religiously, even if my teams aren’t playing. A time for so many things I love that I hate to see the season pass.
But I guess some good things come from fall’s end: The first real, significant snowfall is always a beautiful moment. It’s still warm enough that your teeth aren’t chattering, and you haven’t yet allowed yourself to remember that winter in the Midwest will take up the better part of the next four months of your life.
There’s always the chance that maybe, just maybe, a winter storm will be bad enough that adults actually get a snow day from work, which never happens in the Midwest and is usually caused by dangerous temperatures rather than snowfall. If we ran and hid every time it snowed, nothing would get done from November to April.
You also finally have the ability to schedule an activity on a Saturday with the end of college football. But unfortunately, by the time the bowl games are over, it’s so damn cold you don’t want to do anything on Saturdays, anyway, other than curl up on the couch under a blanket.
Then there’s the hope. Hope for what is still to come in the new year. And if you’re a WVU or Notre Dame fan like me, the hope that next year will be better.
The Procrastinating Writer 