Fall

I am against it. After the rebirth of spring, and the activity of summer, comes fall. Some people refer to it as autumn so they don't use the 4 letter word. To me, that's like saying potty instead of crap. I am just not a fan of fall or even autumn. There is very little I like about it.

The days shorten. I now go to work in the dark, and once daylight savings time expires I will come home in the dark. The day we go off daylight savings time is to me, the dreariest day of the year. Of course you get a little more light in the morning, but to me it is depressing to leave work at dusk. It requires a whole week to work out the drearies. The lack of sunlight means that I must now plan cutting the grass or other outside yard work around the expanding dark hours, so it is inconvenient too.

Warmth becomes hard to find. This fall has been an especially cool one. Since the first of October, most daytime highs have run between 18 and 27 degrees below normal. We should be topping out in the upper 60's but have only seen one 60 degree day this month. Warmer weather has come this week, but it is still below average. I certainly hope this is not a trend. The outside chill seems to work it's way inside the house. Setting our thermostat to 68 is a luxury during summer, but the same inside temperature seems frigid this time of year.

Goodbye green. The color ceases to exist during winter, and it's fall's fault. We get a lot of satisfaction from Terri's flowers and my lawn during the summer. But even now, our flowers are not producing many blooms and the lawn will soon start to turn brown. Fortunately our neighborhood was once a Christmas tree farm so we will never completely lose the green, but it gets harder to find.

But trees bring up the best part of fall.

Kansas City briefly becomes a beautiful town for a couple weeks during the fall. The city is filled with maple, oak, and other tree species that turn to various shades of yellow, orange and red. You cannot help but notice. This year has been a wet one, so the trees entered fall in a very healthy state and are just now reaching peak color.

With the recent cold temperatures, there was a risk of a marcescent fall, one with a few days of hard freezes. We had one in Kansas City back in 2001. The leaves freeze on the trees, turn brown, and do not fall until spring, So marcescent is your vocabulary word for the day.

mar·ces·cent (mär ses′ənt)
adjective
withering but not falling off

My personal definition of a marcescent fall would be an especially crappy fall.