Sunday, October 26, 2014

This Time of Year

Fall is my favorite season. When I lived in places where there wasn't really a fall season, I always felt a bit cheated. 

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, fall is lovely. There are lots of diverse types of trees and shrubs with leaves that change colors. It's not quite as majestic as the oft-touted New England fall but I think the contrast of changing leaves interspersed with the numerous evergreens is more interesting.

I find the small but accumulating changes that I make in the house interesting too. For example, there's the gradual switch from regular sheets and a light cotton cover (I have to be covered with something, even in the summer) to flannel sheets and a thin fleece blanket to the full treatment of flannel sheets and down duvet. The arrival of winter will be marked with the addition of a heavy blanket on top of that--but we aren't quite there yet. The cozy bedding makes burrowing back in bed with the dogs for just 10 more minutes irresistible, after they've been fed and pottied, of course (Mimi's bladder waits for no one and no thing).

Shorts suddenly become just a bit too breezy except for a few hours in the early afternoon. Short sleeves are still necessary (campus buildings are horribly overheated) but now I need a light sweater or jacket when I go out (really, just the rain jacket: it's been raining buckets up here for some days now). The bulky winter fleeces and wools remain stored away for now.

I vacuumed the dust out of the gas stove and re-lit the pilot light. As a result, another small change is the sound of the blower coming on at four in the morning as the stove fires up to take the chill out of the main room before I get up.

My interest in using the oven to cook food has revived. Apple crumble. Roasted veggies--this has to be the best way to cook carrots. Roasted pork chop with potatoes and garlic and fresh rosemary from my plants out front. I've got an enormous pot of pinto beans bubbling away as I write this. While I do suck it up and cook beans in the summer too, the chilly, damp mornings of fall seems to be a better time for it. 

The dogs and cat are making small adjustments in their routines mainly by choosing different napping spots. Even Azza doesn't want to linger outside now: a perfunctory perimeter check, a task that she has taken over from Harry, and she is ready to come back in. But that wetness makes their morning walks quite a bit more interesting--damp air and moisture on leaves hold on to odors longer than dry air. Because of my schedule, I can usually manage to find an hour when it isn't raining, or at least not raining very much, to get them out every day.

Fall tells us summer is over and winter is coming. Up here it is a relatively long season in its own right with its own pleasures and rhythms. I am lucky that I can be in the moment and enjoy them.

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