I’ll say it plainly: summer is my favorite. I’ll defend that opinion to anyone who wants to argue about it. But there’s a particular ache that shows up every year around this time: not sadness exactly, more like the feeling of a good book nearing its last chapters, and it belongs entirely to autumn.
It starts on the morning commute. Fog licking low through the mountains, curling into the hollows like it’s got somewhere to be but no hurry to get there. The light comes in sideways instead of overhead now, and everything it touches looks a little more golden, a little more like it’s saying goodbye on purpose.
Then the leaves start turning, not all at once, but in that slow, uneven way where one tree commits an early branch and the rest take their time following. By the time they’re all in on it, the whole drive looks staged, like someone dressed the mountains for a photograph.
There’s a smell that comes with it too: bonfires drifting from somewhere down the road, crushed leaves underfoot releasing that dry, sweet, slightly bitter scent that no candle has ever managed to fake convincingly. I catch it walking the dogs some mornings and it stops me every time, the same way it has every year since I was young enough not to know why.
Saturdays fill up with youth football and soccer games (before for my children, now my students), the kind where half the parents are wrapped in blankets on the sideline and the other half are pretending the cold doesn’t bother them. Something about watching kids run around in the crisp air, breath fogging, fog clinging to the corners, cleats thudding on hard ground, feels like the most honest kind of season there is.
Underneath all of it is the knowing. The knowing that soon enough it’ll be time to load the woodstove, settle into the couch cushion that’s earned its permanent dent in the cushion, and read until the fire needs tending again. Summer is wide open and loud. Autumn is the season that asks you to slow down and pay attention: to notice the fog, the smoke, the exact shade the maple turns before it lets go entirely.
I’ll still miss summer. I always do. But I’ve made my peace with appreciating two seasons for entirely different reasons: one for how alive it makes me feel, and one for how it makes me want to hold still and watch.
