NaBloWriMo 9 (Autumn or not)

Given that Autumn is busting out all over, which is your favorite season and why?  Alternately, which is your LEAST favorite season and, of course, why?

Another prompt (a word I cannot feel the same about since Cruella at Giraffeability of Digressions revealed that it means "fart" in Norwegian - yes, I am that shallow), another post.


I do like autumn.  I'm not amazing at heat.  Or rather, I'm extremely bad at heat.  Every year we have at least one day in the UK when the temperature soars to a majestic 80 degrees and all the newspapers get hysterical and print pictures of people panting in fountains.  I nod sympathetically.  As a basically cold-weather person, autumn heralds my time of year.

It's very beautiful too.  Living as we do in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, when the trees turn red it looks as if the hills are on fire.  Plus we have a large copper beech in the garden which goes the most amazing shade of lurid pink just before the leaves fall.  It makes me laugh - the colour is so extraordinarily un-tree like.

Secretly, too, I love the closing in of the evenings.  It feels as though the world around me is going into quiet hibernation and my brain seems to tick over more.  Stuff that needs to surface has time to do so.  This is more true of deep winter, but I can feel the process starting in autumn.

One thing I've really noticed since our move north is how distinct the seasons are and I've come to love them all for different reasons.  Living in London, as we did for years, the seasons are not as passionate.  Here, they have a real impact on how we live and what we do.  Our lives move with the rhythm of that and I like it.  Spring and summer are both hectic for us.  The garden demands a lot of time and you can see the growth rate.  It really is a miraculous thing to see the raspberry cane we cut back to the ground in February groaning with fruit in July.  The weeds do the same thing too, of course, which is less joyful, but you can't have everything.

Autumn is preparation time.  Winter is for me, for the family, for letting the things that never had time to be thought about arrive and be assimilated.  That is not always a comfortable thing, but it is just as necessary as the ruthless energy of spring and florid growth of summer.

No favourite then.  Just the need for all of them.  Greedy?