Maybe it’s the tiny snap in the air that makes you hug yourself and go find a sweater.
Or the crunch below your feet, where acorns, twigs and browning leaves litter the sidewalk.
There is just something so wonderful and energizing about this time of year.
And I don’t have any idea why I feel this way every fall.
After all, everything around us is in the process of dying, fading, disappearing.
Those dazzling yellow, red and orange leaves will soon be falling off the trees, leaving barren and cold branches.
My garden looks sad and stringy, only a few mums and zinnias still blooming.
The once-glorious peonies are turning into brown, dried up straws. The rose bushes are nothing much but leaves and thorns and my new, fragile hydrangea bush worries me as the nights get chillier and the wind blows harder.
Nature’s good at dying. She puts on a wonderful show.
But where does my energy come from? That innate sense of happiness as I dig and plant and rake my dying garden.
We all know what’s coming. In a few months we’ll be dealing with ice and cold and heating bills. Parking lots will have those filthy snow mountains that have a way of depressing your very soul.
Salt will encrust your car. Cold will numb your fingers. Night will ascend before you get out of work.
I hate winter.
But that’s the trade off, isn’t it? We appreciate fall so much because we know we’ve got so little time left.
And I’m finding, as I wind my way through my 40s, the same holds true for me.
I know that sounds melodramatic, but I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I no longer really feel young. The aches and the pains, the lines on my face, the death of people I love.
I don’t yet feel old, but I no longer think about my life as having a boundless, endless future.
If I want to do the things I always dreamed of doing, I better do them now. I better stop waiting, putting off, making excuses.
Fall makes you feel that way, too. Put in the storm windows before the house gets too cold.
When I was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, fall was all about going back to school, which loomed over the entire month of August.
It was about football and the Steelers, and collecting buckeyes on my street, the new TV season, the Steelers, buying sweaters, helping drain the radiators and oh, did I mention the Steelers?
But now I pay more attention to the changes. The way the light shifts into gray, the chill that grabs hold of you in the early evening, the buzz of cicadas as the afternoon drifts into evening. And then the silence in the afternoon, when the cicadas are gone because it’s too cold.
Fall is about holding onto things and letting them go.
And life is, too.
Yes, fall makes way for winter, but winter makes way for spring and spring is all about the new, green future. Dying makes way, eventually for new life.
And even though I said I am no longer feeling young, I am ready to rediscover the promise of spring next year.
And maybe that’s the real reason fall is so wonderful. I’ve got the luxury of knowing there will be a spring next year.
——— The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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