Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Autumn is my favorite season. That doesn’t make much sense when you think about it. Everything folds up and dies at this time of year. It’s really just a stepping stone to the long slog of winter. In fact, a couple of centuries ago, the autumn harvests meant the difference between successfully clawing your way toward spring or starving to death in February. Even with our fancy modern jackets and overstuffed grocery stores, winter is still something to worry about, a fact which I won’t soon forget. Given the mild winters that Boston has experienced over the past two years, we should be in for something absolutely horrendous this time around. I can hardly wait.

But we’re not talking about winter, we’re talking about autumn, those precious few weeks when the air is crisp, the colors explode, and you can smell the leaves crunching underfoot. It’s the kind of atmosphere that inspires a person to poetry.

I’ll spare you that horror.

Autumn is special. Just listen to (and look at) the way Ze Frank pronounces the word. Autumn gives us Halloween, a culturally sanctioned way to parade around with false medical credentials, express pride in being a murderer, or worship the Devil. It’s also a great excuse to consume lethal amounts of chocolate, beer, or, in a perfect world, chocolate beer. You can even dress up like a goth without it totally ruining your credentials as a human being! The only downside to Halloween? The vast numbers of Frankenwhores you’ll have to contend with. Gloria Steinem is rolling over in her grave. She’s still alive, you say? Not for Halloween, she’s not! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Etcetera. Thematically appropriate reference to the undead.

Still, Halloween is a mere distraction from the real autumn miracle. Every season has its color, and between the ubiquitous green of summer and the deadened gray of winter, autumn is a paradoxical explosion of reds, oranges, and yellows. Plants are lucky. How many living things can say that they’re going to look their best right before they die? The sky, set behind a foreground of reds and yellows, closes in, fighting for attention, and appears more blue than ever. I pity people who live in places where they can’t see this. I pity even more the people who stand right in the middle of it but never take the time to look.

What is autumn, really, when you get down to it? Some pretty colors, a moderate drop in the temperature, and a certain smell in the air. It hardly seems worthy of so much adulation. Of course, autumn is more than just this autumn; it’s all the autumns you’ve ever experienced. It’s my first day of school, twelve times over. It’s pumpkin carving with my whole family, where with a proportionally sized pumpkin for each of us, it’s the closest we ever came to simulating a Hallmark greeting card. It’s the fact the somehow, somewhere in the midpoint of every October, I catch the scent of a wood-burning chimney on the air, no matter where I am.  It’s that seasonal glint in the air that makes everything feel warmer, even as the temperature slides downward.

The other three seasons aren’t cumulative to me. They don’t add up over the years the way autumn does.  That’s why I love it so much.