I love the leaves that change from drowsy summer green to surprisingly brilliant yellow and red. I love sleeping with the windows open at night. I love the first night when the temperature drops below about 55 degrees and you have to snuggle up under the covers or wake up with an icy nose. I love the snap in the air with the cool mornings that lazily warm up as the October sun rises in the sky. I love putting on sweaters after months of t-shirts and tank tops. I love simmering some apple cider on the stovetop and smelling the cinnamon waft through the whole house. I love the sight of pumpkins perched on front porches and bin after bin of crisp apples in the grocery stores.
I love it all.
And I love that William seems to love fall, too. He is delighted, absolutely ecstatic by all the Halloween decorations that have popped up over the past two weeks. He helped me pick out another pumpkin and a big scarecrow at Michael's the other day so that we, too, would be "a Halloween house."
I get this giddy feeling when fall seems to have arrived at last. I don't know exactly when I developed this affinity for this season above all others. I don't really remember, but I think it may have been when I was living in California, though, and deprived of four normal seasons. When David and I lived in San Diego, we used to plan at least one October trip to this little mountain town called Julian, an hour or two east of SD. Julian was known for its apple orchards. We'd drive up there in the morning and wander around the little gold-rush-era town, then buy a few jugs of fresh-pressed apple cider and a couple of fresh apple pies to take home with us. There was almost nothing as good as a crumbly Dutch apple pie from Julian. We made sure we always procured one, somehow or other, for Thanksgiving and Christmas meals when we lived in that part of the world. Since then, apples, more so than pumpkins, really signify autumn for me. We never really got the red, gold, and orange leaves in California, but at least we got apples. Now that I live here in Tennessee, we get it all.
And the best part is that there's still a lot of autumn left. We have plans to attend at least one or two costume parties before Halloween, plus then there's Halloween Night itself. And November is nice around here, too--and I adore Thanksgiving almost as much as Halloween. And today, we went to a pumpkin farm, down near Franklin. It was so perfectly autumnal that I was a little dreamy-eyed. I mean, how is this for storybook? We took a hayride and wandered around a pumpkin patch where you could pick your own pumpkin.
And of course, having Leland with him made it that much more fun for William:
1 comment:
Sounds like fun at the oumpkin farm! I thought you might have to get do something with Leland shortly after you got home because William told me he really missed her.
With Love,
Dee Dee
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