Summer is over, fall is here. In northern New England, fall started in August, with the changeover in bugs and the nighttime temperature drop. It gets foggy and misty, and when it rains it’s COLD. This happens every year and yet I am sad every time it happens.

I love summer.

It’s not as if I hate winter. It’s been nearly forty years since I left Honolulu for college on the mainland, and I’ve come round to the view that Christmas should be snowy and fireplaces are awesome. Winter is great.

But up here where I live, it’s too long, and I struggle when the darkness goes on and on. And in the fall, I particularly dislike the sense that summer is dying.

We never say that winter is “dying,” right? We think of spring as birth.

But we don’t think of fall as the season where winter is “born.” We think of death, and that makes me sad.

Which is why fall is just a hard time for me emotionally, because I feel the grief in every leaf and blade of grass. The burst of joy that was summer becomes a period of mourning and decline. I feel sad and sorry for all the greenery that gave me such pleasure for the past four months. I start to worry about the flowers, wondering if they’ll be back (sometimes it’s the moles and voles that are back, not the flowers).

I’m usually an optimist, and I think what my brain has done with my sadness is it’s decided that fall does not equal death. Instead, fall equals the new school year.

School? I’m not in school.

(Well, I am, but that’s a story for a different newsletter!)

Mentally, I think I start a new school year every September, as a way of coping with the growing dread that is fall. I clean, I organize, I throw away. I find new projects to plan, old ones that I ditch. I find new coffee flavors (nope, I don’t like pumpkin spice at ALL! Is anyone with me on this one? I’d rather have a REAL pumpkin pie, not an artificial flavoring!). I remember recipes that I wanted to try.

My husband even installed a brand-new sink, we threw away all the horrible old cabinetry, and now we’ve got stainless steel rolling counters in the kitchen. (This is DEFINITELY a subject for a different newsletter: what to do with a terrible old kitchen!)

(A farmhouse kitchen is a workspace!)

And yes, I’ll admit it, I remember that I like sweaters and that I like having a specific piece of outerwear for each type of weather (I just got some jackets re-waxed, hurray! I’m ready for rain!). I like boots. I like hats.

There’s a balance between denial over the things that make us sad, and the reconfiguration of the ideas that make us sad.

Having just watched 9+ hours of funeral coverage for Queen Elizabeth II (I wasn’t really watching all of it, but I did look up from my work more often than I should have) I was thinking about how much everyone will miss her. She was a devout woman, and the religious leaders who spoke at her services reminded us repeatedly that after a long life of service, she was going to her reward.

But I was so moved by the tears of her family, the staff who served her, and the ancient ceremonies that took place to mark her passing. Death just doesn’t feel good. We’ll miss the Queen, even if everything about the end of her era was gentle and correctly done.

New school year, is what I say. I hope the royals reorganize themselves, decluttering the stale and useless and making space for new understanding. I think we all have the capacity for more empathy and understanding, and it all starts with fresh new pencils, even when we feel nervous at that first whiff of pumpkin spice.