It Feels Like the First Day of School

This morning, Sherri and I took Will for his walk, and for the first time in a while, the air felt just a little chilly. Nothing dramatic. By the afternoon it would be hot again, and summer would remind us that it isn’t finished quite yet. But for those few minutes this morning, it felt different.

It felt like fall.

Just a sneak preview, really, but apparently that’s all it takes for me.

Fall is easily my favorite season, and somewhere around the middle of August I start looking for signs that it’s coming. They usually appear slowly at first. Back-to-school displays take over Target. The first Oktoberfest and pumpkin beers start showing up on store shelves. A television promo reminds me that new seasons of shows are coming. Then the local Spirit Halloween opens, and suddenly I decide we’re close enough.

We went to Spirit Halloween last weekend. It was still August and plenty warm outside, but walking around looking at Halloween decorations, costumes and all the other spooky nonsense was enough to flip the switch. I bought some pumpkin spice coffee creamer—don’t judge me—and started burning a fall-scented wax melt in my office.

The trees are still green and the calendar still says summer, but I’m ready.

Honestly, I’m always ready for summer to end.

I have a theory that nobody really likes summer. We just spent our childhoods associating it with being out of school and confused that feeling of freedom with enjoying the actual season.

Hear me out.

As a kid, summer meant no school, staying up late, going places, hanging out with friends and having almost no responsibilities. Of course we loved it. But take summer vacation out of the equation and what are we left with as adults? Days that look beautiful through the window but are often too hot and humid to actually enjoy.

Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair. I love baseball season. Cookouts are great. There are beautiful summer evenings, and I certainly don’t spend June through August hiding inside complaining about the weather. But most of the things I enjoy doing outside in summer are even better when it’s 65 degrees with low humidity.

By late August, I’m ready to open the windows.

That’s one of the things I love most about fall. We have a big bay window in our living room, and once the humidity finally disappears, we can open it and let the cool air into the house. There’s a perfect stretch where it’s chilly enough outside that you can feel it coming through the window, but not cold enough that you actually want to close it.

We spend more time eating lunch or dinner on the deck. The air conditioner is finally quiet. There’s usually a fall candle or wax melt burning somewhere. Summer’s oppressive humidity gets replaced by air that feels crisp and comfortable.

There’s a particular kind of fall day I love most. Sunny, somewhere around 60 degrees, comfortable during the afternoon but chilly enough when the sun starts going down that you reach for a flannel shirt or light jacket. Whenever I step outside and feel that particular chill, I still find myself saying the same thing:

“It feels like the first day of school.”

I say this a lot. Usually people look at me strangely for a few seconds before they realize exactly what I mean. There’s something about that particular combination of cool air and sunshine that my brain apparently connected with the first day of school decades ago and never let go.

I haven’t had a first day of school in a very long time, but apparently my brain still remembers exactly what one feels like.

Maybe that’s because so many of my memories of fall are tied to the senses. More than any other season, fall has a smell to me. It’s crisp, dry air and fallen leaves. It’s fireplaces and campfires. I grew up in a rural area where people commonly burned piles of leaves, so even that smoky smell immediately takes me somewhere.

Then there’s the food. Pumpkin spice, apple cider and eventually the unmistakable smell of Thanksgiving dinner filling the house.

There’s even one smell that probably shouldn’t make me nostalgic at all: cheap plastic.

Anyone who grew up wearing those inexpensive Halloween costumes with the thin plastic masks probably knows exactly what I’m talking about. They had a very particular vinyl smell, especially after you’d spent ten minutes breathing into one while trying to see through two tiny eye holes. I’m sure it wasn’t particularly pleasant at the time, but somehow my brain filed that smell away under “Halloween.”

Halloween was a pretty big deal in my family, although thankfully my best costumes didn’t come with plastic masks.

My grandma made costumes for my brother and me, and she could make anything. When I was probably in kindergarten or first grade, I wanted to be a T-Rex, so she made me an entire dinosaur costume. It was stuffed, had a long tail, and to little-kid me it was about the coolest thing imaginable.

I also remember her making a Wolfman costume for my dad. She took an old pair of his jeans and a flannel shirt, added rips and tears, and had fur poking through underneath. We all thought it looked amazing.

Halloween night usually meant heading to a nearby development with my brother and cousins and coming home with more candy than any group of children could reasonably need. As I got older, trick-or-treating gave way to haunted attractions. Some nights we’d hit two or three of them.

These days Sherri and I are slowly figuring out what our own Halloween traditions will look like. There are local makers markets, car shows and festivals we enjoyed last year and will probably visit again this year. Maybe if we keep going, we’ll eventually realize they became traditions without us ever deciding they were.

We’re also planning to step up our decorating this year. Nothing too extravagant, but enough that people know we’re participating.

We do already have one Halloween tradition I’m particularly proud of: full-sized candy bars.

We both remember how incredible it felt as kids when you went trick-or-treating and discovered that house. So now we get to be that house for the kids in our neighborhood.

Also, we want them to think we’re cool.

Halloween wasn’t the only thing that made fall special when I was growing up. Fall also meant fair season. Starting in late September, it seemed like every small town in the county had its own street fair or carnival. We all had our favorites, but we went to pretty much every one at least once.

Even now, I can hear them when I think about fall: crowds talking, rides running, bells and buzzers from the games, everything blending together. There are other sounds too. Leaves crunching under your feet. Novelty Halloween songs appearing on the radio. That weird electronic “eeeeeeee” noise seemingly every Halloween decoration made in the ’80s and ’90s.

If I think a little deeper, I can hear the school bus stopping at the end of our driveway on the first day of school. I can remember being sixteen and driving with the windows down because the temperature was finally perfect for it. Fall also meant youth bowling season was starting again, something I’ve written about before and a huge part of my childhood. School started, bowling started, the fairs started, and Halloween was approaching.

It’s interesting that a season associated with nature winding down has always felt like the beginning of something to me.

Entertainment was part of that feeling too. When I was younger, I looked forward to AMC Monsterfest and all the horror movies that suddenly appeared around Halloween. I loved the Halloween episodes of Roseanne, and later The Office. Even hearing goofy spooky songs on the radio made the season feel official. There was something fun about the rest of the world suddenly enjoying the things I liked all year.

Recently, I saw a couple of TV promos using the words “Season Premiere,” and my brain immediately translated that into fall TV season. For most of my life, those things went together. Summer meant reruns, and fall meant new shows arriving and old favorites returning. There was genuine anticipation around the new fall schedule.

That’s not really a thing anymore. Streaming means shows start and stop whenever they want, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I miss the ritual of it. Apparently that association is still buried deeply enough in my brain that two words in a television commercial can make me feel like fall is coming.

This year I’m thinking about keeping horror movies and spooky television running in the background while I work. I don’t necessarily need to actively watch them. I just want them around, adding a little atmosphere.

A creepy lava lamp, basically.

For all my love of Halloween, fall doesn’t end for me on October 31. If anything, Halloween feels like the kickoff to the entire holiday season, and Thanksgiving deserves more credit than it gets.

I love the food and seeing family, but I also love the way Thanksgiving feels. It’s cold outside, but inside the house it’s almost too warm because the oven has been running all day and the house is full of people. The smells are incredible. That contrast between the cold outside and the warmth inside feels like the perfect finale to fall.

Then, sometime on Black Friday or Saturday, our Christmas tree goes up. That’s when the next season begins.

But when I really think about why I love fall so much, it isn’t the fairs, Halloween, pumpkin spice, horror movies or even Thanksgiving that I keep coming back to most. It’s something much quieter, and it’s a feeling I’ve had trouble describing for most of my life.

The house is quiet. That’s an important part of it. The temperature inside is comfortable, maybe just slightly warmed by the heat, and that particular fall sunlight is coming through the window. I’m watching something good on TV or playing a relaxing game that doesn’t ask very much of me.

Nothing is really happening. I’m not at a fair or celebrating a holiday. I’m not doing anything that would make a good story.

Everything just feels right.

It’s not excitement, and I don’t think it’s entirely nostalgia. It’s simply this brief feeling that there’s nowhere else I need to be and nothing else I need to be doing. The house is quiet. I’m comfortable. Whatever is happening outside can wait.

I don’t really have a name for that feeling. I just know fall seems to bring it out more than any other time of year.

Maybe that’s ultimately why I start looking for the season before it actually arrives. The Spirit Halloween signs, the back-to-school displays, the Oktoberfest beer, the pumpkin spice invading my coffee and that first unexpectedly chilly morning aren’t fall themselves. They’re little promises of what’s coming.

This morning, for just a few minutes while we walked Will, I got a sneak preview.

Summer will be back this afternoon.

But fall is coming.

And I can’t wait.