Fall Fantasma

There is something magic and strange about this time of year that I can't totally explain. I love fall for a variety of reasons, but one perhaps is that ever since I was a child, it has brought up feelings, almost reminiscence to something intangible. It reminds me of all the longings and wishes that I have left unfulfilled and drives at me to look ahead.

Maybe it's partly that fall used to mean a new academic year, clean slate, new teachers, sometimes new school and friends. It's the feeling one gets beginning a big new project where any of the old flaws you had before get left behind. Fall signals a literal razing to the ground of the world around us. And maybe that's harsh, but it's also pretty liberating. Everything around you is full of promise and for a moment all your bad habits seem surmountable. For me fall is the essence of control over one's own destiny.

It's a time for staying inside more, for darkening hours and celebration of the hearth. Or maybe just your space heater. In fall I go crazy for pumpkin and apples and the bounty of the summer reaped now for my benefit. I like hot spiced drinks, the kind to sit and ponder. For one reason or another fall has always meant self examination, maybe that's why they're called mulling spices...

In fall I tend to think a lot about the fact that I have the capacity to keep warm and cozy, that I have the luxury to enjoy what is going on around me from a distanced, safe, point of view. There are lots of people who rather than appreciating the loveliness of the fall color change have to instead focus on the fact that the temperature will drop 20 degrees overnight. And in its way, I have to feel grateful all the more for what I do have, rather than worrying so often about what I don't. Fall holidays, even the Hallmark ones, just don't feel so contrite the way Valentine's Day hearts and Shamrocks saying "Kiss me I'm Irish!" do.

Thanksgiving is perhaps the be all and end all holiday in our house. Granted, we get more stuff over Christmas, but when I think of celebration and actual good-time family fun it's always Turkey Day that my mind wanders to. My mom taking three days off of work to make a meal. Making that meal stretch over hours and hours as 13 courses come out in their own sweet time.

As a teenager I dreaded the thought beforehand. I always wondered how on earth I'd make it through the marathon sessions of forced bonding. But at the end of every annual meal I found that the awkwardness never lasted past salad, maybe soup if it was an election year. And even if differences made their appearance, the yelling across tables over morals and values didn't leave me with a big "dysfunction" stamp on my forehead. Just the opposite, it made me think that here are people who really value what they believe in, who are willing to defend it, and do so intelligently. And at the same time, at the end of the argument we're still content to gather round and stuff our faces with mashed potatoes and discuss whether or not Jamie Lee-Curtis is a hermaphrodite.

Perhaps that kind of tolerance is reserved for one's families. But I like knowing that the people I love are capable of finding it, even if it's only for each other.

I wonder sometimes about tradition and whether growing up as a Caucasian mutt in America has left me without a sense of culture. And then I think of fall and realize that everyone creates their own traditions and these self procured ones are just as important to treasure and follow. That they are where the longstanding ones begin and grow out of. Maybe, in its way, fall is simply reminding me to find traditions I never knew I had. To long for connectedness to the things I already know. Which is a magic of its own sort, and one well worth celebrating.