The longer I live… the longer I am a homeowner/adult/wife/mom/employee, etc… the more I learn how I feel about my life in general. The day to day minutia can really drag me down if I don’t have certain things I harbor as sacred. And I think that’s why I like to reminisce so much and why I hold so many memories dear to my heart. A lot of people don’t like to think about the past but look to the future. I hold a set of good memories as a salve to heal current wounds.

Most of my autumn memories are just snapshots of a time; I will smell something on the air like burning wood and instantly picture the pot belly stove in the living room of the vacation house my family visited in Western New York. In the evenings, it turned dark very early and we didn’t have a TV that got more than one channel so we worked on jigsaw puzzles and read while my grandpa stoked a fire. He loved to sit and watch a fire burning.

If the air is crisp and cool, I think of the crabapple trees on the property of the Hungry Hollow house (same as above). Their fruit was often on the ground and not very good tasting but we’d pick up the discarded little red apples and fling them into the lake or up into the valley. The ker-plunk sound they made as they landed pierced the country quiet.

Ash and I went to a different movie theater last week and it had a dark, musty smell about it, sending me back to a time we visited NY and my mom convinced me to brave it down to the cellar. I remember standing at the top of the steps leading down into that black nothingness below that smelled of water and darkness and earth. It terrified me.

But everything I took away from those October trips out to the country where solitude reigned and scared this city girl to tears changed the way I saw this time of year. It is comforting in a “things are changing/hunker down for the winter” way. At the same time, Autumn makes me feel a little sad because the year is just about to slip away and what have I done? What did I accomplish this year? I try to make a list, though one list of “things” does not nearly suffice for all that we’ve really done. Just letters making up words making up stuff that no one can truly understand unless you lived it. So the list is for me and to help me get through this dichotomy I deal with every October through December,  just before the New Year comes and renews me for another length of time when I am prepared to go out and do and make the most of my life.