Autumn
The heat of summer doesn’t suit me. Never has. The blazing sun, worshipped by nearly everyone else, burns and peels my fair, freckled skin. I’ve never had a tan, not for a single day in my entire life. It could be worse: many are born with life-long afflictions; I got handed an eternally pasty complexion. So yeah, it wouldn’t kill me to count my blessings.
But when I feel the first cool nights in late August, when an occasional September day reaches a high in the sixties, not the seventies or eighties, I feel my blood flow, like sap rising in a long dormant tree. The waiting is delicious. I know fall is coming, I can sense it days before it arrives.
My football career as a youngster was brief to the point of nonexistence, but my lack of talent for the game did not diminish my enthusiasm for it. When the leaves began to turn and the weather cooled, I’d don whatever jersey I happened to own at the time – I’m pretty sure I had a Minnesota Vikings jersey I loved for the bright purple color – and harangue my friends into a game of touch football.
When I was ten my family moved to a three-story frame home that had once been a farm in a rural part of southern Iowa. Suddenly loosed from the constraints of city living – we’d spent the previous ten years in Omaha – I was free to explore the woodlots and cornfields around our small town at will. And explore I did, nearly every day. In the fall, like every other kid I knew, I’d grab my BB gun, my bow, or, when dad finally let me, my shotgun and my dog, and hunt for whatever I found – quail, squirrels, rabbits. In those days, kids with guns and bird dogs were considered part of the landscape, not a menace to society. I loved it. And all of that – football, hunting, my dog – were inextricably linked to cool weather.
So all of you sun worshippers out there, god love you. Sure wish I could get a sexy tan (even once!). But when it drops into the thirties one of these nights soon, don’t mind me if I’m smiling while I fish around my closet for a sweater. Now it’s my season.