Holly, Jolly

Eventually, it all has to come to an end. We don't live in Westeros, where the summer runs on for years and years at a time, holding off bitter winter with days of long sunshine to better light their traditional pastimes of incest and murder. I haven't actually read all those books though, so I imagine they must do something else more mundane for fun, like some kind of ball game. Probably using someone's petrified heart for a ball, though. I miss that show.

No, we live in a more traditional setup of annual seasonal cycles, driving our crops and our weathers and our allergies, affecting our comfort if not livelihood in three-month stretches of lolling amnesia--cowed by the cold or heat-stricken, depending on the angle of the sun versus the equator and your relative latitude--where when the change comes, as it has never failed to ever once before in the annals of recorded history, still someone will say "I can't believe it's [month/season/holiday] already!!!" and, probably now, "lol!"

We fought through the spiritual end of summer when Labor Day passed, but we could at least hold on to thread of procrastinating hope insisted on by astronomers, Wiccans and people with Asperger's syndrome* telling us that the actual end isn't until the Autumnal Equinox spins into reality on September 22.

And lo, it is nigh. Fall is upon us, all bluster and long shadows. Fall is pensive and decelerating, a cleansing shudder to molt away the sun-blasted crust touching our last layers of skin, leaving us pale and uncovered with little time to gather the deep breath before the ball-shriveling plunge into the mortal cold of looming, glooming winter. Summer is all bright abundance and gathering, the wonder of hot Sundays and sand, Popsicles and sweat, hot dogs and melanoma. Winter is close walls and layers, shivering clamminess, forced air and Gore-tex, an unending fight of human ingenuity to keep out the probing, piercing fingers of cold cold cold trying our defenses to fix its squeezing icicle grasp around your struggling, beating heart until it is silent, solid, still.

I may be a little bit prone to seasonal affective disorder. I'm not afraid, though. There's nothing I can't face down with the help of my light box and the right balance of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. Except maybe a snow leopard. Ha, of course, no. Those are not common to western Riverside County. I'm way more likely to be eaten by a coyote driven mad by hunger. Or hit by a driver drunk on office Christmas party punch.

Odds are I will survive, as I have all the other upstrokes and downstrokes in the celestial spin and thrum. Survive and thrive, to emerge into another glorious spring, just in time for me to turn 40.

It's not too early to start letting out your Christmas requests. This year I'm asking for peyote.

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*The first and third being probably the least mutually exclusive of all categories.