Missing the Fall.

Summer is my favorite season. My body doesn't deal particularly well with it - I sweat more than most people and my skin gets the crap kicked out of it by the sun - but summer is my favorite season.

Summer is my favorite season because of the last hour or two of daylight. The sun sits at such an angle that its light is soft and golden; it takes long enough for it to go down from there that the evening is marked with a air of casuality. As the golden light drapes over the tops of the lazily swaying trees, an hour or two seems to pass in three or four. There's a magic about it which makes me stop more often to appreciate that moment more fully than any other in the year. I am deeply grateful to be alive and to have a chance to enjoy the beauty of the world in those waning moments of a summer evening.

But I don't miss summer very much when it's gone. This is mostly because I'm usually resigned to the fact that my summers will be devoted to activities like leading at summer camps or going on mission trips. In the summer, I'll usually spend some time closer to the equator, and I think the angle from there is less conducive to creating that summer moment I hold most dear. With camps and things like that, I'll be anticipating the night, when young people have spent the day together and aversions to vulnerability get broken down. That's where a lot of the action happens, where people will be more open to getting to the heart of things.

In the other months, I'll think about the upcoming summer and the things I have set before me and I'll remind myself to embrace the few times I get to fully soak in those parts of the summer I hold most dear to me. As a result, I experience them deeply, enjoying the full measure of their beauty.

But fall? I miss the fall.

The school year starts up, so the ministry year starts up. I never feel very good about myself unless I feel like other people need me. So after the last part of the summer, where nothing is really happening, I'm bored and useless. The fall takes care of both of those concerns, so I put full energy into ministry and into the people involved with it. I spend whole days thinking about what role I'm playing at a certain event or replaying previous ministry events in my mind. Unlike with the summer, I don't spend the other seasons reminding myself to enjoy the beauty of the fall.

So I miss it. I miss sitting outside in a park when it's gotten cold enough to ward off most people, wearing jeans and a comfortable sweater and pensively staring into the distance. In the fall, it just seems like the thing to do, so my hyper-introspective tendencies alienate me from others a little less.

I love the sound of the leaves crunching under my feet. "Crunching" doesn't seem like a soft enough word.

My street might be the best street around to live on in the fall. It's not very wide, and there's a tree right next to the curb in every single yard. Some yards have two. It's a one-way street, so I have to drive up its length every time I come home. The trees on both sides hang over so that the leaves spill into the street. For a few days when the leaves are falling, it's the prettiest thing you'll ever see just driving in a car. I'll drive up my street and the leaves will be falling on both sides - red, yellow, orange, green - falling to the street in slow-motion as my car makes its way to the end of the block. It plays out in front of me like a shot in a film that somehow loses none of real life's beauty in its transfer to the medium. It is magical.

I'll have to find a way to remind myself to enjoy it.