As the weather sharpens and the leaves die a slow death, the thoughts turn inward. It is a natural instinct, as we ready ourselves for a long sleep through winter, protected by our cave walls and lying among our family members by a fire.
Just kidding. With fall comes a frantic buildup of everything the human ever created to stress him or herself out. If you're in school, it's getting to be the time when you really start to panic, trying to manage internships and jobs and all of the work you're expected to do. You sit in class, waiting to leave so you can get a head start on the homework they just assigned (due a liberal four hours from now).
The good teachers make you want to do more for their classes or follow up with film clips or things read in class. Unfortunately, the amount of busy work you have makes you a non-responsive slug when you're done with the day, unwilling to devote your time to anything but a screen and a generic junk food of your choice. So little of the time spent at home is spent doing anything but homework, who would waste any more time doing things even resembling learning? You're just going to have to do it all over again tomorrow.
If you have a full-time job, then that rumbling sound you hear in the distance is the holidays. Ask not for whom the consumer is rude, they are rude for thee. Blind frothing crowds siege the stores, buying metric tons of plastic crap that their children may or may not care about five seconds after they receive it. The number and aggressiveness of ads on TV and the radio ramp up to mind-numbing levels, dissolving thought into a brain-wave hiss of static. Every PR team in the country is working hours impossible for any less masochistic humans, looking for the illusive new take on a 2,000-year-old holiday. Any new product is either being teased or launched, the online traffic in stores skyrockets, pumpkin spice lattes start their yearly rampage through social media sites and Santa is routinely exploited.
However, if you remove yourself from the hysterical, mounting whine of fall's cultural aspect and look at its natural aspect, everything else seems to fall away. The trees prepare themselves for dormancy, packing away their eager buds. Those people who use wood stoves split, haul, and stack wood near to their houses, scenting the air with their fallen foliates. Candles burn in darkened corners, lending a flickering brilliance to the fading light of the days. Woolly Bear caterpillars curl themselves up under leaves and in hollow trees, sensing the oncoming cold. Frosts spiral across windows and over still-verdant grass, refracting the thinning light.
Apples harden in the bite of the new wind, and cider is pressed. The phrase "come in out of the cold" is used more and more frequently, by mothers and grandparents and friends alike. Jackets are taken out of storage. It is usually discovered in families with children under 16 that everyone has outgrown everything from last year, so clothes are passed around from family to family, age group to age group, sometimes causing winter gear to last decades.
Pumpkins firm up into jewel tones, scattering their orange hues through the dark fields like coals in a brazier. The sun's light turns from a bright white-yellow to a golden syrup, spreading over hills and valleys and almost giving everything a sepia tone. Meals become hot and hearty, filling the body and mind with warmth. Families start girding loins for the welcome or otherwise onslaught of in-laws and other members of their clans, basting turkeys and taking bread from the oven and telling small children to stop giving the dog gingerbread. Maple syrup is boiled and skimmed and sold from person to person, much more cheaply than it would be found in stores.
The things that make fall wonderful are not those that you'll hear anywhere in the news or on the internet. They're the things that most of us are usually too busy to notice. The things that we don't pay enough attention to are the things that give fall its true character; that of simultaneous warmth and chill, dimness and a soft dampening of all aspects of summer. Fall fashions are transitory, and the coffee flavors will change, but the sound a leaf in the wind's wake makes when it laughs across a road will always be the same.
