Ode to Fall

There is change in the air.

"CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES!"

(My first concert when I was a kid was David Bowie. My mom's kind of awesome.)

No, I'm talking about FALL! Autumn! My favorite season! I remember once, in the fourth grade, our class did an activity where we each took a piece of paper and wrote down our name and our favorite season. Someone then grabbed the Scotch tape and categorized the pieces of paper on the board by season. About 90% of the kids wrote down summer, with a smattering of spring and winter favorites. I was the only one to scrawl "FALL."

I've always loved fall; sweatshirts and jeans, my beloved copycat Frye boots:

flannel shirts, beautifully colored leaves, school supplies (obsession briefly discussed here), and the encroaching time of darkness in the evenings, in which my mom builds fires in our fire pit. Fall is a gorgeous, dynamic introduction to the cascade of holidays the later months bring; a time for cooking and baking things that I find inappropriate at other times of the year, like pumpkin cookies, long-simmering chili, roasted sweet potatoes and apple pie; a time for impromptu road trips to orchards to pick apples for said pie; most of all a time of both great anticipation and great enjoyment.

That said, there is something beautiful about the time of year we're in right now in Ohio. I like to call it the death of summer. Don't worry; I'm not going to wax poetic all over you again. It's just that since the times of ancient cultures, the in-between times -- of the day and of the seasons -- are supposedly the most magical. Dawn and dusk, spring and fall.

Right now, the nights are getting cooler, even though it still reaches nearly 90 degrees in the daytime (thanks, Ohio, home of crazy weather fluctuation). Things are dying -- plants (my basil resembles more of a dead branch stuck in the ground than a tasty herb), bugs (I crunch over far too many dead cicadas to mention when I walk the dog) and the carefree attitude that summer naturally brings to the world. Kids of all ages are back in school and squirrels are starting to freak out about eating and storing enough food for winter. The trees just look plain tired, and last weekend I saw the first yellow leaves of fall on an admittedly very early-changing shrub.

 Welcome, fall! Only three days 'til September, people. I'm starting to crave roasted pumpkin seeds.

Sammie