It’s Fall. It’s actually late Fall. It’s actually almost winter here. We’ve had our heavy frosts, the thermometer made it down into the 20’s (F), most of the pretty leaves are gone, I’ve seen some frozen precipitation. And I have loved every minute of it. It’s a good Fall when there’s some frozen precipitation in October. It’s a great Fall when that happens before the last week of October as it did this year.
Fall is my favorite time of year. It’s when I feel most alive, when my outlook is the brightest, when I feel I can take over the world. Winter is a close second. You don’t want to know me as Spring rolls around and, for heaven’s sake, stay out of my way in the middle of July when it’s hot and sticky. I whine worse than my three kids combined on their worst day. But Fall. Glorious Fall. It is simply the most wonderful time of the year. I don’t care what the song says. It’s actually the one season of the year for which I do any house decorating. Here. Look. Look closely. You will see mums (in crummy plastic, straight-from-the-farm-market containers) and a cute little scarecrow. This is my house at its homiest best.
The leaves have been beautiful, as they are always beautiful, but not strikingly beautiful this year. Some individual trees have been breathtaking, but when you get a view of the rolling hills, they’ve been dull this year. Beautiful, but not vibrant. More like the colors we people wear in Fall. Subdued tones, orange-brown, red-brown, tan. (I’m no good at colors. That whole sensory thing, you know.)
Why do we wear those colors in Fall? I mean, I don’t, but that’s because I look like death in those earth-tones. But I’m thinking of those seasonal sweaters that people pull out. Where I lived in Georgia they seemed especially popular. October came and all the church ladies pulled out their Autumnal-colored wool sweaters. Subdued browns and reds and oranges, leaf patterns, matched with similarly-hued corduroys. Pretty. But I just didn’t get it. It was 80-some degrees!! 80-some degrees for crying out loud!! And there they were. In wool. And corduroy. And this Northerner was still roaming around in shorts and a tee-shirt. Because. As I said. 80-some degrees!!!
But it gave the illusion of Fall. It’s October, it’s Fall, they make these pretty Fall sweaters, we simply must wear them. No mind that it’s hot hot hot and wool is decidedly not made for hot weather wear. Now I’m sure I’m offending my Southern readership (all two of you). But my intention is not to offend, simply to marvel. I don’t know how those women walked around in those sweaters when it was so warm outside.
I was suffocatingly hot and I couldn’t find any clothes to wear at the store because I had no idea what was seasonally appropriate for a sweaty October. This was a real dilemma for me. I think the church ladies had it right. They wore Fall clothes. But I was too hot. So the calendar was telling me it was time for long sleeves and sweaters, but the thermometer was telling me to put on a bathing suit and go swimming. Strange. It was all very strange. And I have totally digressed. I want to return to the color scheme of our Fall fashions.
They’re all so subdued, those Fall fashion colors. But right now I’m looking at two maple trees out my front window, and there is nothing subdued about it. Bright, almost neon yellow-green and yellow-orange. These are the colors we wore over-sized in the 80’s. The 1980’s, that is. Not the colors that the Georgian church ladies wore in the 80’s. The 80-some degrees, that is. And my current church ladies of the North wear the same sweaters in the 50’s or 40’s, so I’m crossing the Mason-Dixon line now.
But seriously, the colors of Fall are vibrant, other-worldly. My husband, a quirky, wonderful man, has some peculiarities with regard to colors. Both wearing them and eating them. He won’t wear or eat something whose hue he can describe as “not being found in nature.” He is most suspicious of maraschino cherries. Those are just entirely unnatural to him. The color is “not found in nature,” the consistency is too reminiscent of plastic (I’ll give him that). He’s convinced they’ve never been cherries but are strictly factory-made.
Clothing? Same story. He wears “earth-tones”: tan, gray, tan, brown, black, beige, tan, green, an occasional burgundy, but only after repeated reassurances that it’s not too bold. Countless times have i heard, “I can’t wear that! That color does not occur in nature.”
But in the Fall, his whole schema falls apart. Because in the Fall, all bets are off. God pulls out the 64-box, maybe even the 96-box, and goes to town with all manner of colors and color combinations. Colors I can’t name put together in ways we would never wear, yet all amazingly, breathtakingly beautiful.
Well. Maybe we would wear them. And did, depending on how old you are. Think back to the 80’s. The 1980’s that is. I wore these colors. My friends wore these colors. My husband did NOT wear these colors, he would have called them unnatural. Much of the 1980’s was extraordinarily unnatural. But the color of our clothes was not. Our permed and blown out and sprayed hair may have been. Our heavy blue eyeliner and matching blue shadow may have been. But our neon clothes? Straight from God’s palette.
My poor brain. It works so hard to keep a handle on the world outside of it, keeping track of all that stuff around it, and then the world throws this at it. Here, poor sensory-deprived brain, make sense of this: green leaves, orange leaves, snow-covered branches, and trick-or-treating in two days.
