Fall: The Best and Worst of Times

I have a love/hate relationship with the fall season. It is my favorite season in Minnesota because of the changing colors and scenery. Harvest times are special watching the farmers gathering their crops and gardeners, the produce from their gardens. Apple trees full of apples begging to picked and made into cider, pies, and apple crisp. I love how certain flowers in my garden are most beautiful in the fall like my Hydrangea.

I love the cool crisp mornings and the fresh air. I am energized by the aisles of school supplies. I always loved the start of the school season especially when I graduated college and started teaching school.  Setting up my classroom with a theme for the fall and for open house was always a highlight. I loved meeting my new students and watching them wander around the classroom to see what there was to look at and finding their desk for the first day of school.

While I love the changing colors of the trees, hillsides and flowers it only reminds me all too soon of the shorter days and the colder temperatures to come. All too soon I will be leaving for work in the dark and returning home from work in the dark. The shorter days seem to take my energy with them.

We live by a lake and it is always a sad thing to remove the dock, boat lift, and boat from the lake each fall. Each year we help my Dad take his sailboat out of the lake as well. Too many summers we have helped put his boat in the lake in the spring without ever taking the time to go for a ride before it is time to take it out in the fall.

I love sleeping with the windows open listening to the frogs in the nearby pond or the waves lapping against the shore and the call of the loons as I drift off to sleep. Fall nights turn too cold too soon and it is time to close the windows at night and close out my favorite sounds as well.

It’s been four years since I quit teaching. The workshop days at school and teachers talking about preparing their classrooms make me long for my classroom and bright smiling faces of the students entering the classroom eager to learn.

This fall is different than past 25 years. No students in my home, no classroom for teaching and no students to watch grow over the course of a year.

I could always go stock up on school supplies for old times sake.