Fall is often a time for great change.
At the time this blog post goes up, it will be the first day of fall, and I will hopefully be in Boston with Skip on our almost-annual BroSox Adventure. Should all go according to plan, this will mark our first fall game, which is reminiscent of the very first Red Sox game I ever attended with my family, way back in 1986. More on that later – for now, let’s focus on this particular first day of fall – it will come with enough memories.
There are numerous musical connotations that rekindle fall in my mind, bringing me back to various times, such as ‘Alegria’ which tracks the emotionally-perilous mid-90’s and my first tentative steps living in Boston. It should have been a lonelier time than it felt – so often was I alone and on my own – but I didn’t allow myself to be lonely.
On this blog, since the first day of fall usually kicks off with a featured fall post, we are revisiting some first-days of the past, such as this one which went up in 2014: ‘Time In A Bottle’ is an apt musical motif, as fall makes the fluctuations of time somehow more keen.
In 2015 fall was welcomed in this fine and simple fashion.
For a website that’s been around for twenty years, I invariably fall into repetition and repeats, so 2016 found us back in familiar territory.
I took the summer of 2017 off from daily blogging, so the return to fall was a return to writing. Following the same summer vacation schedule for 2018, the blog was back in this ‘Oh Fall’ post.
The summer of 2019 feels like the last summer of carefree innocence, before the pandemic hit, before we knew how dark things could get. In some ways, fall followed suit, with this post that feels ages and eons away from where I am today. The blissful brink of the abyss… we had no idea what was in store for us. Back then, it was enough to create our own manufactured drama. Feels quaint and silly and indulgent and wonderful now, and I miss it.
Cut drastically to the fall of 2020, after the world as we knew it began to fall apart. We needed fall songs then, such as this one by Taylor Swift.
Sometimes fall begins with a silent dance, as in this scarf-laden post. By 2021, we were all a little weary but it wasn’t anything that a new Abba song couldn’t attempt to fix. So, here’s to life, and for not dying on this day as a man dressed as death once predicted.
Following the new lease on life, we burned everything down in the fall of last year. 2022 provided a reckoning and exorcism of sorts for past emotional garbage. Fire and feathers conspired to give the season a new glow, while these flames of September served as a healing antiseptic. Burying the fire in a litany of words was the best way I knew to move forward and leave the past in the past.
On this first day of fall, I’ve found a song that brings me back twenty years – well, the song actually found me in the way that destiny sometimes intervenes – a gift of the last Super Blue Moon, and it’s coming up in a post later today. Let’s meet back here in a bit to reconvene and listen together – in the meantime, Happy Falling.
