My favorite time of year has just arrived. The first day of fall was officially September 22. Maybe the season of fall came a couple weeks ago, but for me autumn has just graced us with her presence today. The last couple weeks I've watched the leaves begin to turn. Yellows and reds have slowly appeared around the city. The tree outside my bedroom window only has a few more green leaves on it. More leaves are on the ground around town, and the roads are beginning to accumulate piles. Soon homeowners will have to buy leaf bags and begin to rake their lawns. As a child, I never understood the reason for raking leaves. In fact, I never really thought there was any reason at all. I guess I figured that because our garage had rakes, we had to use them when we could. Apparently my childhood logic was a little weak.
For me as a child, autumn was a season of putting on coats and buying outdoor decorations. This is the first time of the year where I remember people putting things on their patios and doors. Hay bales and pumpkins and gourds appeared. Leaves were cleaned up and stuffed into big orange bags that looked like jack-o-lanterns and left on the lawn for Halloween. I remember the trees in my neighborhood would be bare and naked. That's when it first occurred to me that most of the trees in neighborhood really had gray bark, not brown. I realize that may be an odd (and pointless) conclusion, but to a child, it is groundbreaking.
The next thing that I associate with autumn is smell. Perhaps it is the cold weather that draws everyone into the kitchen to cook and bake more. Maybe it is the season of Thanksgiving that first boosts a baking spree. The end of a school year and saying good-bye for the holidays could also cause more people to cook farewell dinners. Either way, hot meals and warm cookies, cakes and pies are an integral part autumn- mostly the ones that come from my mother's oven. My mother cooks with the most motherly culinary talent ever. If a person ever knew how to please a child's taste buds, it was my mother. And she didn't feed us junk food. We never had store bought cookies, cakes or pies. She never allowed us to buy cereals with too much sugar and we hardly ever had soft drinks in the house. Perhaps she was starving our palate to preserve it for her own cooking. I guess it worked because she knew what she was doing. When my mother bakes, she never skips or substitutes sugar, butter or cream. My mom knows the key to a great recipe is the part that holds the most fat (sugar, butter, cream). She bakes miraculous apple and pumpkin pies with a homemade crust every time. And she knows how to handle chocolate: brownies, cakes, caramel cake cookie bars. Cookies!- I had no idea how good she was at this simple sweet until I started baking. You know it takes a real baker to know that the exact oven temperature, placement on the cookie sheet and position in the oven, as well as an accurate cooking time are enormously important factors in the taste of a cookie. She would cook coffee cakes or monkey bread in the mornings. The smell would come through a vent that fed into my bedroom. These days when I'm home, it's the smell of coffee that seeps through the vent and pulls my lazy body out of bed. My father was wise to marry a woman that could not only cook, but cook well. The smells of my autumn come from my mother's kitchen, through the vent to my bedroom and eventually onto the dinner table.
Autumn is my favorite season for many reasons (one being my birthday, of course). But one year, I missed autumn. Seriously, I never experienced the fall in 2005. At the time, I was very aware that I would be missing the season, but it was something I surrendered willingly, though it wasn't really a disputable part of the bargain. I flew to Sydney, Australia in July 2005. When I arrived, it was the middle of spring and a very rainy season. Summer came in October and by December, we were laying on the beach. I was sad that I missed fall, but there's nothing quite like laying on the beach in the middle of December on the other side of the world. I'm not sure if I could ever make up this lost season of 2005, but if I have the opportunity to double up on autumn, I'd take it!
It's cold outside tonight. It's been very windy and trees are shivering. Tomorrow, there will be even more leaves on the ground. And I'm quite sure people will soon be figuring out why there have been rakes in their garages all year long.
