I am the ONLY person I know who does not sing the praises of Autumn. All my friends look forward to the cessation of our desert heat when the humidity drops to single digits. They express endless gratitude for the crisp cool air and colors of fall. Me – not so much. Each season does have good points, but for me the darkening of days, the cooling air, the descent into winter does not herald a positive trend.

Along with this is the churning of time. I don’t mean the minutes that ebb from my life, a steady drip into the bucket of forever. I’m talking about the changing of clocks. One reason I love Arizona is that this state did not get sucked into the folly of daylight “savings” time. Our clocks remain the same through all the months of the year. However, because everyone else in the U.S. changes time, I must remember which time zone they have switched to. Annoying. I’m sure someone sometime had a savvy presentation with charts and graphs to justify the idea. But as a wise old Native American was once credited with saying: “Only a white man would cut two inches off the bottom of his blanket and sew it to the top and think the blanket is longer”. That sums up the ridiculousness of daylight-saving time. What are we saving? Which bank is it in? Can we spend it when we really need it? Daylight is one of nature’s gifts and follows the tilt of the sun and earth according to seasons, not a man-made device. No matter how you slice it we have the same amount of daylight. It is shorter in the winter in the northern hemisphere and longer in the summer, but the number of hours can’t be expanded by moving the hands of a clock.

I am a warm-weather sunshine person. My husband agreed to move to Tucson so I could warm up after living forty years in the Pacific Northwest in a constant state of chill and I don’t mean the trendy kind. We’ve lived here twenty-seven years so I’m beginning to thaw. However, when temperatures dip below 80°, I put on long underwear. No kidding, even in Tucson – you can ask my husband. I get frosty to the bone very easily. No, it is not a medical condition, it is a mental condition. Thankfully the sun shines here most of the time in all seasons thus providing us, the cold-blooded creatures, with a modicum of warmth during each day. Darkness does not overtake us as it did in Seattle.

In the Pacific Northwest, fall and winter are not only colder and wetter than summer, they are also darker. Daylight is barely nine hours. We got up in the dark and came home from work in the dark. Dull skies muffled in blankets of gray clouds during what was said to be daylight hours did not allow a smidge of sun to peek through. Sunshine was as rare as a Corbin Carroll home run in the 2023 World Series. Depression – your name is Seattle winter.  

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday so that is the plus for Autumn.  In Tucson, we serve our big Thanksgiving meal about 4:00 on the patio. We usually have twelve or more family and friends join us. The doors stay open and people go in and out. Turkey is cooked on the barbeque and all the trimmings are set out on the counter so the hungry can help themselves. They choose to sit inside in the dining room or out on the patio tables. Most often outside is favored. After dinner (when the sun retires leaving a beautiful sunset) we put on a sweater or light jacket to sit outside with a glass of wine and good conversation and watch the stars blink on. We build a fire in the chimenea for atmosphere. It is a beautiful celebration with friends. The weather doesn’t cooperate one out of four years. Then we serve dinner inside just like those unfortunate people who don’t live in the Sonoran Desert.