Fall is like a funeral

I've always hated fall.

On the surface, sure, it's a great season. The weather, at least in Denver and Maryland, is perfect: Most days are cool, crisp, sunny. The trees light up like fireworks. Even the commercial components of the season are above-average; you've got Halloween candy and sweater-weather stuff and pumpkin-spice-whatever, which I actually kind of like even though I pretend not to. And I haven't even mentioned that fall means football, which I love (although, for Pittsburgh fans this year, that feature has been more of a drawback).

But, in spite of all that's good about fall, I hate the season because it scares me.

I've always had this fatalistic thing where, as I'm in the middle of enjoying something, I start to dread its end.

When I was in elementary school, I used to work myself up in knots during summer break, obsessing over the fact that within a month I'd be back in school. When Alli and I find a TV show that we like, I immediately count out how many episodes we have left until the experience is over. When the weather cools and the leaves turn, all I can see is winter.

I know it's cliché to say this, but the tragedy of time is that every good thing ends. I think the ache of that is part of what it means to have eternity in the human heart, and I think fall is the essence of that feeling.

Alli and I went hiking last weekend at Roxborough State Park.

Roxborough State Park is a little reserve right over the first ridge of the foothills, and for Colorado, it's a kind of an understated place. It's small. It's nowhere near as breathtaking as the peaks a few miles farther into the mountains.

But on October 15, 2022 in the late afternoon, that park was a glimpse into some other world. The sun was just starting to set across an egg-blue sky, and against the slopes of the hills and the red of the rocks, the dying yellow leaves of the cottonwood trees were catching the light, glittering a fragile, glowing gold. We walked a slow three miles through the brush, watching the wind weave through wild grass, listening to the last birds of the year, marveling that the moment existed. It felt like looking at eternity.

In a couple weeks, the park will be brown and gray, and the birds will be gone, and there won't be any leaves left.

I don't think I'll ever like fall. It's too much like death.

But I think I probably need it, anyway.