Autumn. It’s my favorite season. Just the word conjures images of leaves burnished to unnatural shades of orange and red, crisping under your feet when you stroll, the cool of an evening sitting outside with friends and family.
Actually it’s been above 90 degrees here in Chicago all week. So much for my Autumn images. Nonetheless, I have high hopes for this season. It will bring me a sense of rebirth, of starting anew, with all the energy that infuses.
I have not been a student since I can’t remember when. Sure, I take an online course here and there, attend a webinar or two each week, but it has been ages since I bought text books and school supplies and headed off to my first day of class, nervous about who I could sit with and whether the teacher would be inspiring or an ogre.
Each Autumn, despite the decades between schoolgirl and retirement, I get that excitement in my belly, that nervous energy that causes one to take stock of her life and dive in. I suspect many people do this at the end of the year, when they are making New Year’s resolutions.
But for me, this is the time of year that feels most like a fresh beginning. Kids go back to school, those big vacations and trips to the beach are completed, dormant projects pick up momentum again. It is a time of inspiration.
BEING OUTSIDE
It’s unusual that I love fall more than the spring, because in Chicago those first cool nights are a harbinger of the cold winter ahead. But for me, the excitement is still palpable, and it is tied to my early aspirations to be an author.
I lived a charmed childhood. Two of my best friends lived on my street, one a year older, the other a year younger. The neighborhood was full of kids who were sent outside after dinner to play until bedtime. We had enough children for a makeshift baseball or football game, for raucous games of hide and seek or mother-may-I.
BEING INSIDE
Once inside, bathed and in bed, I would pick up a book and read for 30 minutes, if I could keep my eyes open that long. I would read stories of other children. Stories that captured my imagination and told me of another era – Anne of Green Gables, Betsy, Tacy and Tib, or The Four Story Mistake. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Maud Hart Lovelace and Elizabeth Enright stories danced in my head and took possession of my soul.
By morning, I would have my friends playing Betsy and Tib to my Tacy. Whatever they did in the books, I wanted to do. We would ride our bicycles through the neighborhood, through rustling piles of leaves that would be smokey bonfires when the sunset. W were bringing stories to life until I was unable to tell fiction from reality. They certainly merge together now in my memory.
Those books had a lasting effect on my childhood and my life as an adult. They fueled my curiosity and my imagination. Tacy wanted to be a writer and I embodied her desires and behaviors. That love of reading, combined with making fiction fact, and that need to write stayed with me through the years. And so did my love of that time…Autumn.
Books You Might Enjoy:
- The Betsy-Tacy Treasury and other books by Maud Hart Lovelace
- The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright
- Ann of Green Gables Series by Lucy Maud Montgomery