When Anne and I left for San Francisco, it was basically still summer around here: temperatures in the mid-80s and jackets gathering dust in the closet. We came home to find the first layer of snow on the mountain peaks and frost on the car windows in the morning. What a difference a week can make.

Since we’re unquestionably into Utah’s all-too-brief fall season (there’s possible valley snow forecasted for this weekend), I thought it might be fun to do the Autumn Meme I saw over at Electronic Cerebrectomy the other night:

1. Have you ever been apple picking? Not in the sense that this question is probably intended, i.e., walking out into an orchard with a bushel basket under my arm like an image out of a Norman Rockwell painting. However, my grandma had an apple tree in her back yard when I was a kid, and I picked fruit from it all the time, including in the autumn.
2. Is there a dish you make/eat only during this time of the year? Pumpkin pie, I guess. It’s weird — you can make the stuff anytime of year, really, but nobody ever does, do they? There’s just this brief window around the end of October through Thanksgiving when anyone actually wants it.
3. Will you attend a tail gate party this season? Definitely not. I am most assuredly not a sports person.
4. When do you turn on the heat? When it gets cold. Duh. Most years, that’s around the beginning of October, so it wasn’t inappropriate that the furnace came on the night I got back from San Francisco.
5. How many sweaters do you own? You know… I honestly don’t know. I have a wonderful wool cardigan I bought in England many years ago, and I did go through a Hemingway phase in the ’90s when I acquired a pretty extensive collection of heavy cable-knits, but off the top of my head… I don’t know.
6. Are you fond of Nouveau Beaujolais wine? The what now? I know next to nothing about wine, and what little I do know, I picked up from the one time I saw the movie Sideways.
7. Do you get excited about Halloween? I suppose so. It’s always been my favorite holiday — I always liked dressing up as a monster or a pirate when I was a kid — but these days, I think a lot of the fun is getting sucked out of it by the same retail forces that made Christmas into an annual drudgery of buying a whole new barrel of animated, light-up crap to replace all the animated, light-up crap from last year.
8. How about Thanksgiving? Nah, I’ve never been a fan of Thanksgiving. The gathering-of-the-clan stuff that many people look forward to was always a chore at best for my family, if not an outright catastrophe.
9. Is there an activity you do only in the autumn? Raking leaves. There’s not much call for it the rest of the year.
10. Have you ever burned leaves? Nope.
11. Do you own any “scarecrow” decorations? No, but my mom always hung this paper scarecrow with real straw hair in our front window for Halloween, for as many years as I can recall. She still has it; I may see if she’ll let me borrow it this year…
12. Do you plant bulbs? Nope. Not much of a gardner, I’m afraid…
13. Your fondest autumn memory? Hm. There’s a lot of them, actually, mostly associated with Halloween. I always loved walking in my elementary school’s costume parade, and there was one year when my costume — a sort-of Phantom of the Opera get-up, I suppose — was so impressive that some guy I trick-or-treated had me wait on his porch while he ran for his camera. There was another year when a neighbor created a walk-through spook alley in his barn and invited me to be one of the spooks. And I always loved going to the professional and semi-pro spook alleys; the March of Dimes Haunted Old Mill was a family tradition for a long time. There used to a lot of those “haunted attractions” around these parts; I remember when a dozen or so of the big spotlight beams they used to advertise themselves swept the valley’s nighttime skies, like London during the Blitz, all through the month of October. Most of those haunted houses are gone now, and the ones that remain are, like modern horror films, a little too horrific for my tastes.
14. When does fall begin for you? When the heat of afternoon seems to lose its oppressive quality in late August or early September. The temperature may still be in the 90s, but there’s a sort of dull quality to it, just beneath the surface, like the driving energy of summer has been spent and now the season is slowly draining away. Not long after I sense that shift in the temperature, the mountains start to turn yellow as the leaves in the higher elevations change.
15. What is your favorite aspect of fall? I like the quality of the light, that dusty golden haze that turns everything into a sepia-tone photograph. Combine that with some sweet-smelling wood smoke from a fireplace and I feel… content.
16. What do you like to drink in the fall? Cider, hot chocolate, the usual stuff. I’m thinking, however, that I may have to work Irish coffee into the rotation. There was this place in San Francisco, you see…
17. What is fall weather like where you live? Depends on which part of fall you’re talking about. Early fall around here is more like a classic Indian summer. As I said, it was pretty warm at the end of September this year, and the last couple days have been comfortable as well. However, the forecasts show the temps plunging this weekend, and it’s not unusual to have snow, or at least damn cold rain, on Halloween.
18. What color is fall? The expected answer is probably orange, but honestly I think of the blindingly blue skies we get in the early part of the season, before the storms start coming in.
19. Do you have a favorite fall chore? Hm. Not really. Raking leaves can sometimes be therapeutic. Often it’s simply Something That Must Be Done, though.
20. What is your least favorite thing about fall? The sense that another year of my life has passed and there are still so many things I’ve not accomplished.
21. What is your favorite fall holiday? There’s really only two of them, right? Halloween and Thanksgiving? And we already covered my feelings on these above…
22. What’s your favorite kind of pie? I like pumpkin quite a bit, and also a particular Dutch Apple recipe my mom makes for Thanksgiving. It has toasted coconut on top… very yummy.
23. Do you have a favorite fall book? Not a specific book, but I usually find myself in the mood to read Stephen King around this time of the year.

And there you have it… my nostalgic musings on the season. See you all at the spook alley!