Autumn's Here

“you can tell by the wind
by fresh cut wood
all stacked to dry
that autumn's here
and it makes you sad
about the crumby
summer we had…”

I think the fall is a season of nostalgia for me.

Fall is nostalgic like the afternoon is nostalgic. I remember when I was a kid and was most keenly afraid of the dark and most keenly susceptible to homesickness. I would always feel the pull of home most strongly in the late hours of the afternoon. The world around me would be gilded in the long, fat rays of the setting sun, and all I could think about was how I wasn’t heading home, how I wasn’t sitting down to dinner with my family. Looking back on it, I think homesickness is all about nostalgia. It is the remembrance of what is familiar, what is comfortable, and a longing for things to be like that now.

If you were to ram the four seasons into a day, autumn would be the late afternoon, and just as the afternoons would get to me when I was a kid, the autumn gets to me now.

That’s probably because the fall has always been a season loaded with gatherings and fond memories. From the time we were kids to the time we finished university, fall was our new beginning; the start of the school year when you saw all your old friends and got to make some new ones. Then, just one month after we’d started school, there’d be thanksgiving, which was always a time for family with my relatives. And, in recent years, we have made it a time for friends by creating FestivUS as a phony holiday excuse for all of us friends to get together when we all came home from our various Universities. And when you cram my birthday in there, between the start of the school year and the break at thanksgiving, it’s clear that autumn has always been loaded with friends and family for me.

And when autumn rolls around, random bits of nostalgia start swimming through my head:

There’s the kids from East B and Beechlawn and Lester and all the other places our Uni community squatted over the years—memories of our walks to and from the bars and pubs and Oktoberfests of Waterloo, shuffling through the fallen leaves. There’s a wet-yet-warm fall spent with Lindsay Frith on the edge of Mary Lake. There’s leaf fights with my maternal cousins, and there’s thanksgiving dinners with my paternal niece and nephews where they’d drink all the chocolate milk we had in the house. There’s the weddings; you guys and your bloody weddings injecting more memory into my autumns. And, like I’ve already mentioned, there’s FestivUS—how it was one more way our high school group stuck together through all of the drama and madness over the years.

It is for all these reasons that, as the days in Japan cool, the trees begin to turn, and the nights fill with the first whispers of woodsmoke, I am really feeling afflicted by a nostalgia for Canada for the first time. It seems to have kicked off with my birthday—a little bit of a bummer at the end of a road trip filled with fun when I finally realized that I wouldn’t be spending my birthday with all of you wonderful people back in Canada. And now Thanksgiving will be coming up, when you Torontonians will be feting FestivUS back home, my family will be feasting on turkey, and I will be the foreigner in Furubira. I mean, it looks like the international society here will be pulling out all he stops to make it a fun weekend, but I can’t help thinking that I am still going to feel more than a little separated from a great many important things back home.

Long story short, you can all rest assured that I miss you most in the fall.

Now here’s a little ditty from Hawksley Workman that might as well be the official anthem for my autumnal anxiety. What can I say, man; he definitely gets me.

“…i guess that autumn

gets you remembering

and the smallest things

just make you cry.”