Why I love fall September 30, 2009

Damn if I don’t have a love/hate relationship with fall.  In the South, fall is a beautiful thing.   It sweeps in after the long, staggering summer with one chilly night and all of the sudden months of lovely, crisp air are laid out in front of you (well, except for the inexplicable heatwave that always comes through in October).  You finally get to wear your sweaters and your scarves, pumpkins start showing up in the grocery stores, and most importantly, football is back.  Where I’m from in Alabama, Fall lasts a long time.  Proper winter is brief, so you’ve got months and months of all that is perfect about this lovely season. 

It’s not quite like that up here.  Fall means one thing:  OH MY GOD WINTER IS ALMOST HERE. PLEASE EXCUSE ME WHILE I BURST INTO TEARS OVER HERE.

Ok, that’s a ridiculous exagerrations.  Fall also means:

1. Foliage- Listen, they aren’t messing around when they talk about the beauty of the Fall trees in New England.  That shit is magical.  The most impressive thing is how quickly it happens.  One day you drive by a perfectly serviceable green tree and the next day it is a riot of red and gold and orange bright enough to make you almost lose control of your car.  This place is beautiful right now.

2.  Candy Corn- My #1 all-time favorite candy.  This morning I walked into work and a co-worker of mine had a bowl on her desk.  I’m trying to figure out how to get her out of her office so I can dump it into my purse.   I want to find the person that invented it and kiss them on the mouth.  The quickest way to my heart is through candy corn.  (And don’t even think of bringing me those unholy pumpkins that masquerade around as a version of candy corn.  I am not fooled, and Jesus is watching you commit those sins, Brachs.)

3.  Winter clothing- Boots!  Scarves!  Hats!  I love winter clothing, and have managed to cultivate a pretty damn impressive collection of coats and jackets in my short tenure here* and I find it delightful to trot them out on occasion (and by “on occasion” I mean every day from now until May). 

4.  My birthday- It was last Saturday!  I turned 27 years old.  My September birthday is the reason that my middle name is Autumn.   

5.  And finally, but most importantly, football.  I love football. It is my favorite sport above all others.  It makes me so happy.    It especially makes me happy when my beloved team is doing extremely well.  Despite what those fucking polls say.  Ah well, what’s a good Auburn football season without getting screwed by the BCS standings and bitching about the AP Poll?  I have only this to say:  War Damn Eagle.   I’m also pleased that I have found friends up here who are excited to sit around all day on Sunday and watch football (of course, my preference would be to sit around all day on SATURDAY to watch football, but I’ll take what I can get).  They at least tolerate me talking about what happened to all the teams I love and loathe on the previous day,  so that’s good enough for me.

*If you’re keeping track, I also just passed my two-year anniversary of being in Massachusetts.   I do not know how I feel about that, so don’t even ask.

Crisp air September 3, 2009

It’s only the very beginning of September, and even though we never had much of a summer, Autumn is already in the air here.   I’ve been waking up to cool mornings.  Certainly not so cool that I don’t want to get out of bed (well, who am I kidding?  I never want to get out of bed), but cool enough that I need a jacket when I leave in the mornings.  

The onset of cool weather gives me a certain sense of dread, these days.  It just seems too soon to be worrying about snow and coats and dark-at-4:00, especially since our summer was so brief and quick.  I don’t think we even had a single day that was over 92 or so.   Summer up here is so very different than it is in the south. 

Here are some of the things I miss:

• Old men in Seersucker Suits – very, very common in Charleston, especially where business or society forced you into something nice when it was 110 degrees outside.  I found them so charming.
• Giant, cheap watermelons- You can buy them here.  In the grocery store.  Shipped from Mexico.  They cost far too much money and aren’t very good.  In Alabama, you can buy them for pennies and they taste like manna from  heaven.  Or they were free, if I snatched one out of my parent’s garden.
• HEAT- Dear god, I actually miss roasting in the heat of the south.  On many occasions, I have gotten into my car when I leave work, after it sat in the sun for 8 hours, and left the windows rolled up and not turned on the air conditioner, just so I could feel some honest-to-god heat.  I can’t believe that I miss being so hot I feel like I’m going to pass out, but I legitimately do.  When I tell people that, they look at me like I have crazy eyes (as I’m sure you are doing while you are reading this), but I’m unapologetic.  It relaxes me like nothing else can.
• Sweet tea- OK, the stuff they have at Starbucks is actually pretty good, but it’s too expensive and I’m not around one very frequently.  I’ve had to deal with getting unsweetened iced tea from Dunkin Donuts and putting a few packs of splenda in it (because if you ask for it sweetened with sugar, they just dump a bunch into the ice-cold liquid, producing a sugar slurry at the bottom that doesn’t dissolve.  Cue fury!).  How do you get through a summer without sweet tea?