I was born in the heart of autumn on October 20th. I am fall down into my very bones. (I think this is one reason I’m so in love with trees: the changing of the leaves, the crisp autumn air, the smell of coming winter.) Ever since I was a child, I have felt that autumn is the most romantic of seasons. The older I am, the more in love with autumn I become. When I was a teenager, I loved the summer months more than any other time of year because my family would go out and do things more often: day trips to the beach, camping, fishing trips on the weekends, day trips to rivers and lakes. These experiences inspired my initial love affair with nature.

But my young adulthood was where I first learned to love the autumn rains. My bed was situated directly underneath my bedroom window and I left that window open at night so that I could breath in the scent of the falling rain. It was then I learned to recognize and love the smell of fog, the smell of an overcast but dry afternoon, the smell of snow and of snow on the way, the smell of frozen earth and branches. By seventeen, my favorite season had shifted from summer to fall. And now, as an almost thirty-one year old, my favorite season is still fall, followed very closely by winter.

One thing I love about summer is the brilliant saturation of green everywhere. One of my all-time favorite things is the view of golden sunlight shining through green leaves, creating a kind of forest halo in the surrounding area. I also love the dozens of bird songs that fill the woods during summer. Hiking in summer, while agonizing because I hate the heat, is also a tremendous joy for me because I feel connected to the soil and the bark and the leaves and the feathers…I feel connected to all of it. There’s a kind of buzzing life in summer that I don’t feel in the other months.

But it’s a different kind of buzz for autumn and winter. I imagine this must be what it’s like for Persephone going from the Underworld back to the earth in spring: both atmospheres feel right, yet they awaken different feelings inside of me. Autumn awakens a feeling of hauntedness, of spirits and unexpectedness and the sense that something I’m not fully aware of is happening both around and inside of me. I feel this emotionally and sometimes viscerally. I’m most inspired to write in the fall and winter months. I’ve never been able to explain this. In summer, I feel the impulse to go places and do things so that I can write about them, and this is usually quite effective.

But in fall and winter, the inspiration is different. It’s like something inside of me comes alive and aches to be set free onto the page. Something witchy and forest-like; something misty and crisp; something quiet and serene and ominous; something I can’t and hope never to fully understand because the mystery of this phenomenon is something I hope to study until my dying breath. I think about death a lot once September hits, but not in a depressing way. Not the way that makes me long for death or fantasize about how I’m going to die and when. I think about death in the same way I think about anything else related to autumn. It’s almost like a kind of academic inquiry, and it leads me time and again back to the page.

Right now, we’re still in summer and I am truly grateful for that. I’d like to find a new hike to go on before summer is over, and I’d like to return to some of my favorite hikes. I’m going to revel in the remaining weeks of summer. And then I will turn my gaze to autumn and breathe in deeply the smell of the earth from whence I came. I will continue to hike and seek out more of nature. But it will be with a newfound vigor and electric surge. I am a daughter of autumn. And I’m waking up.