Fall Unrequited

Autumn or Fall, for some people is the most glorious of all the four seasons. I too adore the manifest colors of the season but for me it seems so indelibly marked with melancholy. For years I always thought I didn’t like Fall because it meant school was starting again. I was an honors student and on the Dean’s list for many years, yet I detested school.

I think what I really hated was the discipline of having to wake at a specific time during Mondays through Fridays, when I would much rather lie in bed daydreaming.  Then as the year marched on, the days would get darker, longer and colder. I really don’t think that there’s anything wrong with hibernating. The bears have got it right.

But as the years went by and I left school, gradually, there was no need to detest Fall for the forced discipline, instead I’m motivated by the primal instinct of self-preservation. I go to work to feed, clothe and house myself. There is no season(nor reason for that matter) for work. It is 52 weeks of the year and if you’re lucky, sometimes they tell you to stay home.

So why the melancholy at Fall? Why the incipient sadness? Is it because the eagerness of Spring has passed and turned sullen? Is it because the promise of Summer’s sultry nights went unfulfilled? Is it because as the year fades to its end, does Fall simply become the realization that all the sunshine of Spring and Summer were wasted on hopes and aspirations unrequited?