Signs of Fall

Autumn has always been my favorite season. I was one of those children who liked school, and while I remember with fondness long afternoons at the community swimming pool during the summer, an almost-annual car trip to New Hampshire for vacation, and a formative final summer week at Tar Hollow church camp in southern Ohio, I was still glad when September rolled around. The day after Labor Day always brought a return to the freshness of a new school year and lots of extracurricular activities. It may have also helped that September brought the new television season (we had distinct TV seasons back then, with 39 weeks of new programs each year, followed in the summer by only 13 weeks of re-runs--now that ratio seems to be reversed).

Later, during the many years I was living in New England and working year-round, without the summer off, I still appreciated fall. Certain professional and social activities started up again after their summer respite to accommodate various vacation schedules, and the air took on a crispness and clarity that had been missing in the summer. And then there was the glorious foliage and the perennial joy of visual splendor, always for an undetermined but brief time, depending on whether or not the wind and rains came to wash the red and orange and yellow leaves from the trees before they dropped naturally and shriveled.

Here on the Mediterranean coast of Spain the autumn starts later, but now we are in October, and the signs are evident. The first thing I noticed was a few weeks ago, when I woke up early to let Goldie out onto the upstairs terrace, and the air was actually cold! Soon I began to realize that occasionally I would awaken in the night feeling chilly from the draft of the overhead fan. (So did Johannes, apparently, because sometimes I would awaken stifled to find out that the fan had been turned off.) It has now been three weeks or so since I turned on the air conditioning in my office, or the bedroom, or the downstairs living-dining area, but I find myself jumping up and down frequently to adjust the fans.

It is still warm, even hot, during the day. We eat our lunchtime salads in the downstairs sun room, and if the awnings are not pulled out and two glass panels open to catch a cross-breeze, it is too warm. While I am comfortable in capri-length pants inside the house, they get a little too hot even in the short period of time it takes me to hang out one load of laundry on the outside line. Going out for shopping and definitely for petanque, I still need shorts and a skimpier top than I ever would have worn inside or out in New Hampshire. It will still be some time before I need to remove the white silk flowers that earlier this summer I arranged in the living room fireplace insert to brighten up its black hole, so we can start the gas fire.

Fall activities are also beginning. Summer holiday-makers with children have gone back to England and Denmark or wherever they need to go to get the kids in school, and have been replaced by pensioners who have enjoyed the cool weather in their native lands and now return to Spain, at least until Christmas. Our Tuesday petanque group has burgeoned from two or three to 16 or more, and the Friday group has swelled from its low of 8 to almost 80. The Danish club has announced plans for its fall excursion and dinners for the fall holidays, I saw Christmas cards on display at the English card shop this week, and in what I now, in my second year here, recognize as a tradition, our homeowner association has scheduled its annual meeting on the fourth Thursday of November.