Autumn — my favorite season — doesn’t officially start until next week, but I’m feeling it already.
I never was a summer person.
I don’t like hot and humid. I don’t enjoy mowing grass and battling weeds. I’m fair-skinned and don’t enjoy scorched flesh. I gave up swimming decades ago. I love the sweet corn and home-grown tomatoes, but that’s about it.
Fall, on the other hand, seems to be made for someone like me.
At this time of year, I look forward to cool days and crisp nights, wool sweaters and old flannel shirts, apple cider, pumpkin pie, Illini football and crunchy leaves.
And then there’s Thanksgiving … my favorite holiday.
The maple tree in our front yard seems to know, somehow. By late August, with weeks of summer remaining, it starts to turn red. No other tree in our tree-filled neighborhood shifts gears so early.
It must sense that a lifelong autumn person lives inside and appreciates an early show.
Fall can be kind of melancholy, of course, as summer’s greenery fades, cornfields are stripped, the earth turns inward and creatures great and small brace themselves for winter.
But it’s also vibrant and alive, as Mother Nature slips into her most fabulous, flamboyant gown, puts on her most colorful jewels, lets down her golden hair and seems to shout, “Hey, everybody! Look at me!”
Fall also is a special time for someone like me, who enjoys going backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, the famous mountain footpath that stretches 2,200 miles from northern Georgia to central Maine.
This year, I planned a spring hike but canceled it when the weather forecast showed rain every single day of my week-long outing.
Undaunted, I didn’t even unpack the pack. It’s still in the basement, waiting for me to take it on my hike in mid-October.
October is the driest month on the trail, and certainly the most spectacular. I’ll be taking a Greyhound bus to Chicago, then Amtrak to Harpers Ferry, W. Va., where the trail crosses the Potomac River to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Maryland.
There won’t be as many hikers out at this time of year, because the so-called “thru-hikers,” that is, those attempting to hike the entire trail in one year, will have already passed through.
Instead, I’ll meet people like me — people out for relatively short hikes, going slow to savor the beauty of the gentle mountains, Technicolor trees and crystal-clear streams.
I will walk 50 miles, but at an easy pace — six days and five nights out. I won’t have a hiking partner this time — I have outlasted them all — but it’s fun to meet new people who share my love of quiet, glorious, contemplative autumn.