Fall nesting

[mrissa]

athenais was talking about buying a bunch of clothes in lovely new fall colors, and it sounded so good. I don't need bunches of clothes, but last year I found some essentials and a lovely happy non-essential-but-perfect shirt when I was in Boston, and it was such a good thing for fall, to have soft rich colors to wear. I rarely buy myself clothing, compared to some women I know, but when I pick something out as special, I'm rarely if ever wrong: I really do reach for that piece as soon as it's clean. I would really like to go find another thing like that, something that isn't essential but is perfect for me anyway. That would be a good fall thing to do. Can't think when I'll have the combination of the time and the energy to do it, though. Unlike athenais, I don't need clothes this very minute, and I already have "frivolous fun activities" slotted into the next two weekends for about as much energy as I have, if not more. (scottjames, I'm not trying to say that your wedding is frivolous, but my attendance at it is not what one would call essential to the proceedings.) Still, the colors are so lovely this season and have sucked so thoroughly in recent seasons that I feel like I really ought to go grab some basic sweaters and T-shirts quick before they decide that all adult women ought to wear exclusively pink and peach again. It may verge on necessary. I'm not sure.

My other fall urge is another side of the same urge. It's basically a nesting urge, getting enough stuff together to make it through the winter. I want to bake and bake and cook and then bake some more. The day of the tomato basil soup fast approacheth -- basically as soon as I have the energy to deal with it -- and we are, I believe, entirely out of breakfast breads in the freezer. (My usual pattern is to make too many of them, give them away, and then run out at the end of summer before I'm back into baking mode. This is complicated by days like yesterday, where harvesting the tomatoes was more or less the extent of my energy.) Intellectually I know that I will be no better prepared for the snow if I bake a pan of brownies (especially if we promptly eat it), not much better prepared if we freeze a tin of oatmeal sugar cookies instead of snarfing them. I know that baked apples and apple crisp and apple bread are not necessities, that squash soup with fried sage leaves is kind of a lot of work and again not strictly required, that gingerbread may in fact be optional for now. (If you ask me again in December, I will have a different answer about the gingerbread.)

I know that it may reach 80 degrees again today.

But it's September; it's fall. Fall is mine. Fall means we're home and the world is still turning. I don't think it's wrong to want to mark that somehow.

Do you get fall urges? What kind?