Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: happy
  • Music: Christian Kane, "Making Circles."

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Last night, as the first rain of the season washed the world clean and gray and filled the air with the smell of ozone and damp leaves, I curled up on the couch, flipped through the channels, and settled, wonderfully, on Halloween II: Kalabar's Revenge, which was airing on the Disney Channel. The first two Halloweentown movies are among my favorite of the Disney Channel Originals (DCOMs), and the second is my favorite of the two, since it spends so much of the movie being about Marnie and Luke and their weird witch/goblin love. (I don't care if they went and canonically hooked Marnie up with a traditionally pretty warlock boy in the third movie. She and Luke are my DCOM OTP.)

There are Pumpkin Spice lattes at Starbucks and Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts at Target and pumpkin pancakes at the IHOP. Empty buildings are transformed into sprawling Halloween wonderlands with names like "Spirit" and "Halloween Central." Many of them used to be Borders stores. It's like changing one kind of personal church into another, more transitory, beacon of faith.

I spent the last night of September wandering lost in a vast corn maze, stopping periodically to hug the corn, to bury my face in the leaves and just breath in the sweet green smell of the autumn coming in. If one of the boutique perfume companies could make a perfume that was the exact smell of corn maze at midnight, with the dirt and the green and the ripening corn and the cool night air...I would buy twenty bottles. I would sell my entire current perfume collection if I had to, in order to buy more bottles of that perfect corn maze scent. Because it would be the scent of my soul.

For me, this really is the most wonderful time of the year. This is the time when the air smells right, when the coffee tastes right, and when it's easiest to resist the siren song of things I shouldn't be eating, because those things are everywhere.

October is like coming home.
Tags: good things, so the marilyn, this is halloween
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  • 74 comments

seabhac_mhor

October 5 2011, 16:56:53 UTC 5 years ago

People don't believe me when I tell them that California has an autumn. Most of them say, "No, CA only has two seasons, hot and cold."

I just smile at them, nod, and wonder what it must be like for them to miss those changes in the world around them. Like a few weeks ago, right before the last heatwave (the week before the equinox, in fact), when I was out driving somewhere - and literally felt myself drive into autumn.

There's always one last heatwave before the weather settles down into something a bit cooler, and while the trees never get quite that red-and-gold harvest coloration where I live (or rather, some do, but not all), there is a crispness to the air that cannot be anything other than autumn.

Then again, I was born in early November, so I might be a tad more sensitive...

thedragonweaver

October 7 2011, 04:46:53 UTC 5 years ago

I've also heard Sacramento has "Summer, Fog, and Allergy." But that's just Farmer Fred being snarky.

The coloration of the trees depends on the trees themselves. It was mostly Modesto Ash where I grew up, and those leaves just turn brown and shrivel up, but one of our neighbors had a fantastic maple tree that did all of the autumnal colors by itself. And there's always liquidambar (sweet gum to any East Coast types), which gets everything from deep purple to bright yellow depending on the exposure to sunlight.

Huh. "Liquidambar" is in my spellcheck but "snarky" is not.