Hello Fall, old nemesis and arch enemy of school-despising children. How have you been? It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other, hasn’t it? About 9 months – the time it takes to bring a child into the world. What’s new? You always have something new. So many people think Fall is the beginning of putting things to bed. They’re only right about the beginning.
I’m not sure why we never got along.
Wait, that’s not true.
We both know exactly why we never got along, starting with the school thing. How I dreaded what you signaled, how I loathed the turn of weather, how I hated you for accompanying it all with such flare and bright foliage. You couldn’t help but show off as you were instilling so much fear and worry. And I knew our schoolyard battles weren’t the end of it. You were far too tricky.
You always started out so pretty, with your gently-nodding goldenrod and cornstalk sunsets. You cajoled and cradled, but your heart was hidden, and no one has ever told whether something is there. You seduced with your coziness, with the promise of a fire, the scent of burning leaves… the hope of the hearth, but how insidiously you turn.
You know exactly what you did.
And you did it over and over again.
You made me fall in love.
Looking back, it was just the idea of love that I loved so well, but you made it an obsession. Maybe it was the cruel licks of the first few frosts, the way they made my lungs seize up when I rushed out unaccustomed to the cold. Maybe I just wanted someone to make me warm until I could do it myself. Maybe I wasn’t quite as grown up as I pretended to be. Whatever the reason, I lived for love, and you did your best to keep it ever elusive, ever out of my reach. You let it come close a few times, and you insisted that I did my part. You just never let it be returned.
As September ticked into October, and the days were increasingly marred with storms, you kept the hope dangling before me. Those golden days, when the sun still sparked joy, when you could believe that some shred of summer might linger a little longer than before, were always the cruelest, in retrospect. Or maybe they weren’t. The last full month of your season may hold that distinction.
Even the name ‘November’, with its vicious ‘V’ and the way it begins irrefutably with a declarative ‘No’ – so harsh, so unyielding, so absent of joy… we should know then that it won’t end well.
Oh Fall, ruthless masked marauder, taker and breaker of hearts, why should you be so wicked? Why leave such a trail of wreckage in your wake? Why make me make such a mess? Your indiscriminate nature does nothing to appease the pain. More devastation shall surely follow. We haven’t even begun to approach December, when the holidays might, if they’re being gracious, afford a bit of relief. We hang our hopes on that and plan accordingly.
In the meantime, we hope to find some balm of beauty to ease the sadness of seeing those rotting apples left for dead beneath their trees, the ghoulish melting and eventual molding of a pumpkin massacred for its jack-o-lantern purpose. The crunch of desiccated brown leaves on the sidewalk coupled with the desolate branches of the hands that once carried and cared for them – this is the callous nature of what you are. This is the sorrow that you have reaped.
