First World Problems: Fall

It's Fall.

Some people love autumn. They love the weather; they love the leaves; they love... I forget what other things they try to convince me are awesome about this season.

I hate fall, the time of the year when everything dies. The leaves die and fall off the trees. The good ones turn the color of sunsets. The ones in my backyard just turn a sickly yellow and brown and twist their way to the ground with resignation. Frosts come and kill the morning glories and the hydrangea. Worse than the cold and the dying plants (and the squirrels running around like evil, bushy-tailed rats, shoving more nuts into their pie-holes than they can digest and regurgitating the remains on your porch) is the slow, steady decline of the sun, each day growing darker more quickly than the last.

They call it SAD 
For Seasonal Affective Disorder. I used to claim that I have a mild case of this. But to be fair, I keep functioning. I get up every morning (even as they get darker and darker); I drag myself through the day (is that a patch of sunshine in the kitchen? It must be time to do dishes!); I sit on the couch in the evenings stuffing more food than I need into my pie-hole. But I do turn a bit taciturn. While whining passive-aggressively at the Husband yesterday, I realized it's not really SAD, it's more like SAG: Seasonal Affective Grumpiness. And because of me, everyone in the house is subjected to it.

I'm mopey, not really depressed. I snap out of it every year and go back to being a reasonable human without any intervention - usually come December. I'm fine in the winter; I love snow and I don't mind the cold. I like the smell and sound of the heat starting up, filling the house with warmth; the frost on the windows in the morning.

It's just that fall that turns me into a grump. It's losing 6 minutes a day of sunlight. It's the way the sun no longer comes into the living room in the morning; no longer shines through the bathroom window in the afternoons. It's the end of a season of flowers. It's the cold rain that doesn't help anything grow, just seeps into the ground and floods the basement.

What a great thing to blame a season for my grumpiness. "I can't help it; I just have to wait it out until the Christmas lights start showing up in December." But since I don't live in a bubble, I need to write it out, roll it up (metaphorically), and stick it on the shelf. After all, whining about the seasons is not befitting of

-A Real Housewife of the North Shore (The name says it all!)