Autumn Falls Heavily

Fall used to be my absolute favorite season. That was before I moved to the Snow Belt and had to become a responsible working adult.

Now it means nervously watching the weather forecasts as I try to figure out whether frost is going to damage my food plants and trying to figure out when I'm going to be able to clean up the other plants as they die off for the year. It means wondering how soon I'm going to have to put the clothesline away and whether the leaves will ever be dry enough for me to finish mulching them so I can move the lawnmower to the basement so there's room in the shed to put the grill away.

It means not being able to open the windows during the day, because it's too cold when I leave at 5:30 in the morning, and not being able to open them for long (if at all) when I get home because the warmth of the sun is already fading at 4:30 in the afternoon.

It means having to keep an eye on the weather to watch for combinations of rain and below freezing temps which can make the roads slippery in the predawn darkness, and it means the slow onset of first-snow anxiety. Although I tend to relax a little once I've made it through the first snow of the winter, a certain level of snow anxiety remains until April or May, so fall is also a time of having to try to calm myself out of panic attacks at the thought of the impending months of weather-induced anxiety and fear of whether I'm going to have a debilitating case of seasonal affective disorder this winter.

It means having to decide when to switch the screens to storm windows, and when to start the loathsome process of sealing out any fresh air so that we can at least afford to keep the thermostat at a whopping 60 degrees.

It means having to switch out my summer clothes, which it seems like I just finished taking out of storage, to get out the same boring winter clothes I've been wearing for about 8 months a year for the past 8 years. (Minus a couple of pairs of jeans I finally wore through leaving me with the same 4 pairs of pants to wear all winter.)

Just because death and dying are part of the natural cycle doesn't make them any less hard to deal with. The eternal hope of another spring and another summer provide some consolation --in fact, they are vital to being able to accept this season of dying at all. I can still appreciate Nature's last hurrah to some degree, if I can ignore the fact it is an omen of the coming season that can kill the soul even when we keep it from killing our bodies. I can still appreciate it IF I can carve out moments in which to appreciate it for its own glory. It's very hard to get all pumpkiny-cidery-falling-leaves-are-so-pretty-hooray-for-Halloween when you're stuck in a cubicle looking at a computer screen during 90-99% of the daylight hours all season long. But this year I'm going to try to suck every bit of autumnal appreciation I can out of the miniscule evening hours available and the remaining weekends. I'm going to try my best. I'm still me after all, so this isn't going to happen without a lot of hard brain work and psychological fighting. And I could very well fail miserably, literally. But, fingers crossed. And I do have that hat.