Just because it says so doesn’t mean you have to do it. Fall, I mean. We probably wouldn’t even think about seasonal expectation except now we’re in one of the imperative seasons whose name sounds like a command. The other one being spring.
Spring is a joyful season—and I don’t mean merely happy. To call spring “happy” is to miss the entire point of the thing. Like calling a Ferrari good transportation. Or a hot air balloon ride over the Grand Canyon “sight-seeing.” Spring is spring because following a long, cold winter after we’ve been Houdinied up in wool coats and throat-choking serpentine scarves with the frigid air hurting our faces and the ice-covered roads telling us we better stay home if we know what’s good for us, we can get wound pretty tight by around the first of March. When that first actually warm day comes to us with the sun like butterscotch, we are ready to spring. And nothing can stop us!
But fall is the season of stumbling. Summer is over and so is the chance to do all those fun things you planned but never got around to. Fall isn’t summer and it’s not quite winter. It’s a time to rake leaves and check the oil in the snow blower. Sweet smells of harvest are in the air, but close the windows and lock them down tight. Sure, there are some wonderful fall days. But dig out those mittens and earmuffs.
Fall is awkward. Nature has tied your shoelaces together. You know things are about to get real. You can feel your feet slipping out from under you and there is nothing to grab onto.
You could fall into a paralysis of gloom, of course and who could blame you? All around, little animals are burrowing into the earth, hiding until the nightmare of winter is over. While those with wings flee south where it’s still green and there are bugs and seeds to eat.
Humans are generally pretty upbeat about the fall. Our Neanderthal ancestors weathered the Ice Age, after all. We got this. If only it didn’t sound so precarious to be teetering on the equinox. Fall? Who wants to do that? We’re people, not trees.
“Autumn” may be a gentler term for fall. But the word “autumn” is a sort of mumble, humming softly at the end with “umn” as if the summer is tired now and drifting off to sleep.
Falling. It’s an in-between state—not standing upright or yet flat on your face. When you think about it, fall is all about options and possibilities. Planting 50 yellow tulip bulbs in the fall won’t exactly hold back winter. But it just might bring on an early spring.