Sep 17, 2013 3 min read

At 4:44 p.m. Sunday, the autumnal equinox kicks in, signaling the official end of summer and the beginning of my favorite time of the year.

But I understand why there are those who dislike autumn, or fall. The days are shorter, the nights become cooler and leaves clog gutters and litter yards. It also portends winter and that seems to depress the hell out of a lot of people.

Perhaps I have embraced this time of the year because I don’t particularly like baseball, sweating, mosquitoes and fireworks.

I prefer homecomings, Halloween, marching bands, Thanksgiving, waiting for the oak tree to release a salvo of acorns on my roof and seeing mums replace frost-killed annuals.

I enjoy wearing sweaters, returning priority in the garage to the snowblower and ignoring the World Series.

I enjoy professional football on Sunday afternoons, not Thursday, Sunday or Monday nights.

I love the smell of a turkey in the oven and, speaking of smells, who could not delight in inhaling the bouquet of burning leaves, whether it’s legal to burn them or not?

I look forward to mowing the grass for the last time, and, yes, I enjoy raking leaves, even though it is usually not until November that I learn from my local government whether to rake them in the gutter and wait for the “leaf machine” to suck them up, or stuff them into biodegradable bags and wait for the borough truck to haul them off.

While I champion fall, which, by the way, did not originate because of the fall of leaves from the trees, but because it is the season when the sun “falls” below the equator to “spring” back up again six months later (got that ditty off the Internet), there are a few tasks I dislike.

I don’t like putting away the patio furniture. It’s not because of any soppy sentimentality that summer is over, but because I have to hose everything off, usually in cold weather, and then rearrange everything in the basement so it all fits again.

And although I don’t like cleaning out gutters, there is a perverse sense of accomplishment when that job is done.

For me, autumn is all of the above. It also is brilliant-colored leaves, caterpillars and woolly worms, squirrels burying nuts and me getting to turn the clocks back an hour.

And, it is the realization, and acceptance, of changeability.

Winter will come; it always does. The trees will be bare, skeleton-like, and on a windy winter night, they will dance.

In the King James version of Ecclesiastes, it is written: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

This is my season.

Jon Stevens is the Greene County bureau chief. He can be reached at jstevens@observer-reporter.com.