Pumpktoberfest

I’m sure I write about it every year, but as the wafts of pumpkin spice glide out of my coffee mug, I’m moved to write about it again.

Fall. Fall on the East Coast. Growing up where Fall means a certain smell of chill and decaying leaves. Kind of wet, sometimes, the piles you’ve helped stuff into enormous black plastic bags that I’m sure are illegal in California by now. And heaping them into the street, spilling off the curb, where you and your little brother will take a bounding head-start and leap into the center of the pile, the slightly moth-eaten leaves enveloping you up to your shoulders, softening your fall and bathing you and your senses in its musty, alive scent.

I noticed the leaves blowing last night, and here, they sound different as they tumble across the pavement; they sound dry and tired, each one brown and curled up on itself. Back East, they’re still half-alive when they fall, some of them. So they lilt and are soft, and … colored. How many people must write about the color of the leaves, the ombre fade of red and orange and gold. There’s something about their display that radiates joy and change and marks something miraculous, something that we, as humans, have the unique privilege to recognize and admire.

Pumpkins start popping up on doorsteps. We hang Indian corn, the same set of three tied to our front door for as long as memory serves, and three small palm-sized pumpkins decorate our own stoop, before squirrels begin to bite chunks out of them, and a jack-o-lantern we've spent all day carving.

Fall begins the part of the year when I felt and feel most loved and normal and inviting and, again, loved. It begins with Halloween, and follows through Christmas (celebrated at my dad’s folks house, who are/were vaguely Christian). The time of year when we feel swept up in something, in something communal, town-wide, Jersey-wide.

We celebrated, we decorated, we invited, and we lit fires in the fireplace, and ate my dad’s pumpkin pie. Our one time of year when my family could gather together in a semblance of normality, and put on the most average and happy face we could, and it was all decadent. The feeling of it was.

The change of the season with its scent and sights, and the length of the days, the incoming dusk approaching like a secret to encase you. Creeping slowly closer and closer, but welcoming, the cool still amenable, coaxing and gliding you home in the dim light, toward a mug of hot apple cider perhaps. Maybe one of the gallons we’d picked up from our annual apple-picking trip, harvesting hoards of apples, plucked in those wire basket poles that my brother and I would wave menacingly at each other, slipping on fallen rotting apples in the orchard, filling up woven wooden baskets we could barely carry out.

It’s the change of the light and the scent that’s been my indicator these California days. It’s not the same as Back East, but there’s still the aroma of crispness and an excitement.

I will begin to buy all things pumpkin, like the rest of America. Like the pumpkin pancakes my friend treated me to yesterday, and the abomination of flavored coffee that I’m drinking right now.

I will use the pumpkin ganache cookie recipe that was given to me by a college roommate and make the pumpkin pie that my dad’s passed down through trial and error – a recipe that would never, ever, include “Pumpkin Pie Spice,” but itself includes about 8 individual spices, which I own expressly for the pie’s creation.

Fall is a time of coming back to center, of reigning in the resources. Of whittling down excess and getting the necessities done in the light of day. It’s a time that rings with good memories, full, warm, joyous memories. Fall reminds me of the earth, of how the natural world has shaped my experience. And it tastes like the release of a constriction you've held the whole year, the exhale and inhale of a breath you haven't dared relax to take. 

To me, Autumn tastes like love.