Thursday, October 15, 2015

This Is Autumn

The air's taken on that old familiar crispness, the trees are turning russet and flame and gold. Upstate New York's most beautiful season is here! 

 
I made the hard decision not to visit back to Berlin/Germany/other destinations in Europe this fall, even though I'd had that as a goal in sight all year – I was only able to tear myself away from my Berlin life by promising to be back soon to visit! I want to see all my friends there and I want to be sure not to let that part of myself slip away – the part that lived in Europe for all my adult life so far, and traveled like traveling was breathing – so it's scary to decide not to visit there now, without knowing when a visit will happen instead. But right now figuring out What Am I Doing Here, Now...And Do I Have A Plan, At All? is requiring all my mental effort, and I know I need to focus on that first.

So I'm not visiting Berlin this fall after all, and I'm sad about that. But the other side of that decision is that I get to be here to watch all of glorious fall unfold for the first time since I left the US, and that is a deeply gladdening thing.

Also: Halloween! I cannot express how excited I am to be back in the land of Halloween for the first time in almost a decade. (Yes, Halloween as celebrated by Americans is drawn directly from British/Irish pagan traditions, and I will happily talk your ear off about those traditions if you like! But the fact remains that Halloween as imprinted on my child brain is a deeply North American holiday of falling leaves and crisp, early-dark evenings and porches decked out with pumpkins and spiderwebs, a joyous time of dressing up and spooky silliness that's delightfully kid-centered but with plenty of room for adults to get in on the fun, too.) I'm going to a proper Halloween party, I'm going to make a costume. These are simple-sounding things that are a big deal when you've been away from them for a decade.

So, fall in Upstate NY, it's good. Also, this:

1 comment:

  1. You must have meant September for visiting Berlin, right? October is, in my mind, the worst month of the entire year, and I include March when one at times can have lost all memory of the sun entirely. That's because of October's infernal near-freezing yet 99% humidity, either drizzling or on the verge of it. It washes out all the color and with it the pleasure of the leaves falling. It has been a good 15 years since I saw a beautiful upstate NY/PA fall, thanks for the lovely reminder. Greetings from Spain where I am, as usually, escaping the Berlin wind-up to winter, with fingers still crossed that there will actually be snow this year when I go back.

    ReplyDelete