Look Around Leaves Are Brown and the Sky Is a

I’ve been craving the fall a lot lately. (The season, not the band, as much as “Free Range” is a seemingly permanent musical addition to my internal playlist.)

Perhaps it’s simply a response to the oppressive heat this summer, which feels as if it’s topped 100 more often than usual even though I know objectively that’s not actually true — I’m pretty sure that I’m just feeling it more this year because there’s no air conditioning, just small fans and an aging body that doesn’t deal well with heat — or maybe it’s simply my body sensing that the change in seasons is just around the corner and wanting to head towards it, like a homing pigeon speeding up on the final stretch. I don’t know the reason, only that I’m thinking about the fall fondly more and more often lately.

It’s a feeling helped by the fact that I’m continuing to wake up before 6 these days, but the sunrise is getting later and later; there is a curious thrill to waking up before the sun, one that does make me more and more excited for the mornings when it won’t get light until after seven o’clock. There’s a nostalgic magic for me about those mornings, as I remember the brief period when I walked to the local train station to get to school each morning, catching the 7:19 train in the dark with my breath showing. Those, somehow, were the days.

But now, I crave the fall for all the things I remember it bringing. Not just cooler weather, not just darker mornings (and darker evenings! I am surprisingly, ridiculously, excited for nights to get darker earlier again), but everything, it seems. I want the sweaters, the hot chocolate in the evening. I want the trees turning red and brown and the crunch of leaves underfoot as they fall from the trees. I’m ready for the rain and the weather turning shitty in general. I’m Scottish; shitty weather feels natural to me.

Maybe that’s the key to it all. I’m not used to good weather, and too much of it makes me nervous. No wonder I want the summer to end, and for things to get  “worse.” It’s in my genes.

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