Fall’s my favorite season, with its changing colors and crisp air and first savory stockpot of chili. If seasons were a family, fall would be the mother shooing in her children to come inside before it gets dark – dinner’s ready, and don’t forget your jacket! It’s a season where we celebrate intentional change – the sharpening of our #2 pencils, the raking of fiery red leaves, the warming of our home’s as we prepare for a long, quiet winter.
It’s also the season of my favorite annual festival and look, here I go again talking about another festival. But this one, it’s just magical. There’s this smell that hits you the moment you enter the village area, and it conjures up a thousand memories that you never realized you stored – memories of your grandmother’s apple crisp and your neighbor’s midnight bonfire and your father’s leather belt and your elementary school’s wood floor – everything swirling together in a parade of sights and sounds and smells and experiences.
There are witches and hats and cauldrons of cider and pumpkins and haystack mazes and caramel apples and artifacts from years past – all hidden under a canopy of bridges and community. It’s just… it’s wonderful.
It was warm and windy and sunny this year, and Monet and I’d stacked every excuse to skip. But it’s the smell that beckons me; I need it for another year. I need it to mark another mile on our journey; to celebrate another season passed. It whips me into the present, straight into the realization that the life train doesn’t stop moving until it stops moving, and then we have to get off.
I continually have to resist the temptation to cling too tightly to this family, to this life. It’s one of the best things I’ve known, but the truth is, the best is yet to come. There is more waiting beyond the turning of the leaves and the shortening of the days and the bubbling of the chili.
But it can wait. Because right now, we have this very moment. We have now. We have each other. We have today.
