childhood – Natalie J. Case

I was born in September. I don’t know if that has any bearing on my love for autumn, but I like to believe it does. In my Upstate New York childhood, autumn meant new school clothes and supplies (I still love new notebooks and pens and markers and folders and, and, and…), the smell of dry leaves and cider, and the excitement of Halloween. The highlight of October was the annual trip to Kelly’s Farm to pick out our pumpkins and get fresh brewed cider and old fashioned donuts.

While the innocence of that time has gone, and the world is a different place today than it was then, there is a certain wonder to the autumn months still. I sometimes miss the New York autumns, especially here in California where we basically get two seasons, Summer and Not-Summer. Sure we have leaves on the ground and the mornings and nights are cooler, and sometimes even cold, but the true fall colors don’t happen here, unless you travel up into the mountains.

We’re into the time of year here that means long pants and long sleeves in the morning, tank tops and shorts by noon and the air conditioner in the late afternoon. I go to bed with the fan blowing and not even the sheet pulled over me and wake up under blankets chilled.

Last night I refreshed my altar for my ancestors as sort of an invitation. The veil between worlds is thinning as we approach Samhain and I welcome them to visit.

Samhain, and Halloween for that matter, will be different this year, I imagine. For me it is usually a quiet holiday, being the my front door doesn’t face the street, but just the sheer number of newly dead this year…loved ones to be remembered and honored…changes the tenor of the day. This was true for me the Samhain after 9/11, and this is so much more, so many more dead, and many of them left this world bereft of human touch, without the ones they loved by their side.

On that somber note, I wish each of you a lovely week and the kindness and compassion that changes lives. I’m off for more coffee and to log into work. May this autumn be one of a better harvest.

Cover Photo by Dennis Buchner on Unsplash

It isn’t really winter here in Northern California, because it is, after all, California. It is, however, colder here now than it was a few months ago. Cold enough that my early morning writing is being done with my heavy bathrobe on over my pajamas.

I grew up where winters are a little more dramatic, where blizzards could mean days off of school, where I learned to ice skate, and ice fish, on the pond that emptied into Lake Ontario.

I have a lot of fond memories of winter in Upstate New York as a child. I loved the winter then. Sledding and skating and snow ball fights. It would take you longer to get dressed to go out in it than you’d actually spend outside in the snow because it was so cold! As I got older there was the fun addition of snow mobiles.

I left NY when I was 18, and I’ve been back to visit a time or two, but a blizzard that nearly kept us from getting home kind of soured my taste for it. And, as I get older, the idea of all of that cold, wet snow and all of the work just to get around in it, makes me think that I’d rather stay here, where the snow doesn’t bury us to the second floor window and the cold rarely nips low enough to freeze.

It took some time to get used to the holidays without snow, but now that I have, I like not having to worry about driving on sheets of ice to get to see my family. As we head into the holiday season, that’s an important consideration.

Still, I’d take a bit of that snow about now if it would help combat the fires here in California.

Tag: childhood

the autumn of innocence

the chill of winter